wicked sharp blade. Then there was a solid, meaty thump, and Max turned to look at Bill.
The hunting knife had reappeared, embedded to the hilt in Bill’s chest. He was staring down at it, his mouth open in a faintly surprised O, a brilliant scarlet rose already unfurling across his shirt, radiating from the polished wooden handle. Max dropped his rifle and caught him before he hit the ground, easing him to the dirt as a single blood bubble popped from his lips. He looked up at the two men, considered diving for his rifle, but found all the strength had gone out of his legs. Instead, he turned back to his dying friend, his hands now slick with rivulets of blood oozing out in rhythmic dribbles. The blade must have pierced the aorta.
“Oh, Bill,” Max muttered.
A book could have been written on the important things they had never said to one another. Too many things. Max mouthed wordlessly, and in the end, he said nothing at all.
It was over in seconds. The friend he’d lived, slept and fought beside for forty years faded to a meaty vessel in mere seconds. There wasn’t time for fear or pain to settle in. The surprise simply drained from his face as the light left his eyes, and his grip spasmed and then grew slack upon Max’s sleeves. Then he was gone.
Max stared into his sightless eyes. The blood had stopped oozing from his chest. His hands lay curled and limp on the thoroughfare dirt. No shots came whizzing down from the observatory, nor from the armed sentries of the thoroughfare itself. He turned back to face the two men, leaving Bill’s body to slump beneath him, and struggled to his feet. He didn’t bother going for his rifle. If he was going to die, he’d rather do it standing.
“You’re coming with us,” Charlie said.
“No,” Max said. “We’re not.”
The young man’s face flattened. His cheeks were oddly shaped, like putty. Plenty of ugly brawls had broken out in Twingo over the years, and he knew a face that had been recently stomped on when he saw one. Somebody had really gone to work on this kid. He had the stench of ruined goods about him, a good apple made bad by cruelty. “Then you’ll burn.”
Max turned in a wide circle, along with those standing upon the rooftops, to look at the observatory. Even at a glance he could tell there would be no help coming from the hill. Stoic silhouettes lined the entire ridge, black against the rising sun. They outnumbered all the men, women, and children of Twingo twice over—at least two hundred. The roof of the observatory, where Jordan would have taken his perch, was spattered with at least a dozen more silent watchers. They had all come silently, without notice, and they each watched without moving an inch, yet in each hand was the outline of a weapon: all kinds, from automatic rifles to pistols, machetes to hunting bows, hatchets to pitchforks.
The wolfish squat man leered. It looked as though he was almost salivating, and a redness had crept into the whites of his eyes. “I wonder how your stuck-pig friend tastes, roasted on a spit,” he said. “I guess I’ll find out.”
“Fuck you, and your rotten mother.”
The lupine man ignored him, grinning, his tongue stuck hungrily between his teeth. “Morning’s best time for a feeding.”
“You all know what do to,” Max called to the others on the rooftops. He didn’t have to raise his voice, didn’t have to rally, didn’t even have to glance up. They would all fight to the end, no matter how short an end it might be. He sensed them in his peripheral vision, closing around the store sheds in concentric circles, some shaking and some weeping silently, but all ready, all Twingites. He felt a great momentary swell of love for them all, and then he turned it all off like a switch; emotion muddied the reflexes, and any chance of surviving this required an unfeeling soul.
He had hoped to have Bill with him when the end came. In a way, he was. Bill would have found that funny.
He’d always expected things to end like this. That was the way of this new world. He’d gunned down enough bent traders with the townsmen in hails of bullets to feel no real animosity towards these men. Everyone served a higher purpose, gears of a great machine. The world moved on, the tides changed, and crowns