Angel had worked it out, figured the odds.
In this one incredibly fast movement he put everything he had on the line, using every ounce of the strength and skill he had acquired during his long months of training with the Department of Justice, every iota of himself summoned in this half second, to this place, his body a machine to do the bidding of his racing brain.
His right arm shot sideways, jarring Dick Webb off his feet with a shout of pain, knocking the boy down to the ground. Fischer whirled around, the Winchester bearing down on the source of the sound and giving Angel the fraction of a second he had gambled for. The Winchester takes just that millisecond longer to move, to use, than a six-gun and in it Angel had dropped left and rolled, his own right hand finding the six-gun close to which he had so carefully placed himself, the same six-gun that Dick Webb had earlier tossed contemptuously into the dusty street.
Fischer was very fast, his reactions galvanized by the adrenaline already pumping through him, and he lined up desperately on the rolling figure of Frank Angel. He was very good, not an easy man to take; but he had been that half second behind Angel all the way and that made him a dead man. Angel’s shot smashed upward into the open, snarling mouth and drove straight through, bursting Fischer’s skull and splattering the man’s brain outwards in a ghastly misting spray of pinkish-grey. The. Winchester exploded in the reflexive jerking of the dead man’s finger, but the bullet drove harmlessly into the earth two yards from Angel, who was now up on one knee, sighting as Dick Boyd reacted to the sudden movement, eyes wildly seeking a target as his men scattered for some kind of shelter, snatching at their guns as Boyd went down flat dead with Angel’s second bullet in his heart, the drawn six-shooter sliding from his nerveless fingers into the dirt beside him.
Now Doc was running flat-out for the store across the street, flinching as bullets zipped around him, dodging like a deer while Angel emptied his six-gun towards the hidden Fischer riders hunkered down behind a water trough in front of the house down the street from the smoldering, flickering ruins of the destroyed jail. Angel’s fire put them out of action long enough for Dick Webb to squirrel back for shelter around the side of the ruined, charred but still-solid wall of the old jail.
“For God’s sake!” he shouted as one of the townspeople ran past him to safety, “give me a gun! Somebody give me a gun !”
Even as he yelled the words, he saw Angel’s body flinch hard and to the right, his head jerking around fast as a bullet touched him, and then Doc Day cut loose from the porch of the saloon with a shotgun, the shotgun Billy Luskam had dropped when he ran out into the street and was killed. The huge bar oomph! dulled the shouts of running people and Webb saw one of the Fischer men leap upwards and out like some strange fish rising to bait, falling across the water trough and hanging there, body shattered, arms dangling. The remaining three men there laid a heavy fire across the street and Doc ducked back to the shelter, reloading.
Angel was down on one knee in the middle of the street now, supporting himself with one hand, pawing with the other at the blood which tickled down into his eyes from the ragged cut across his temple just below the hairline. His eyes were unfocused from the smashing impact of the near-miss.
“Somebody give me a gun!” Dick Webb yelled again, but there was no one even near him now, and the street was empty except for the macabre figure of the reeling Angel, trying to get to his feet.
“Get down, Frank!” Dick yelled at the top of his voice. “Down, down, down!” He gritted his teeth as he waited for the shot to come from behind the water trough, but there was silence and he could not understand why. Turning his head, he saw the reason.
Swaying there, his hand on the hitch rail, was the most awful sight Dick Webb had ever seen. Almost naked, his body so torn and bloody and broken that it did not seem possible he could even stand, a six-gun dangling from his nerveless, stripped fingers, stood Trev Rawley. “Agghhhh!” he shouted. His voice was like the last call for help at the end of the world, inhuman, eerie.
Frank Angel heard the sound, and seemed to know that it was his name that the sound was supposed to be. He turned towards the place it had come from, the empty six-gun still in his hand.
“Anngghhhh!” said the thing.
Angel stumbled towards the sound. He shook his head, trying to clear it of the red mist before his eyes, the awful resonant pounding roar in his brain. “Rawley ?” he said, his voice puzzled. “Rawley?”
The people bayed in safe places along the street watched in hushed awe. Dick Webb got slowly to his feet. His shoulder hurt like hell. It didn’t seem possible that Rawley could walk across to Frank Angel, but he was doing it, doing it when everything in nature screamed that it was not possible for anyone so badly hurt to even try.
A spastic, twitching, bloody wreck, he lurched forward, putting one foot in front of the other once, twice, then hesitantly again. Dead on his feet, he moved inexorably, relentlessly, raw nerve ends twitching visibly in the pulped face, mad empty eyes glaring with only one desire, the desire that kept him moving —to kill the man in front of him. Two steps more and then two more he made, and still no one moved.
Angel stood there waiting, his head canted to one side, trying to place exactly where the threat was coming from. He heard the sibilant hiss of the footfall in the soft dust. But where, where?”
“Yougghh,” Trev Rawley said, in that ghastly whisper. “Youggghh.”
It was as he spoke the second time that the bright red mist in front of Angel’s eyes cleared slightly and he saw clearly. Rawley—this awful thing was Trev Rawley!—was only three yards away, the six-gun still at his side, and everyone watching, transfixed by the spectacle they could see and yet still not believe.
“Youggghh. D . . . Zzassssth.” You did this, he was saying.
Angel shook his head, and the movement dizzied him. He went down on one knee, hearing a sharp intake of breath from the people watching nearby. Why were they standing watching? Why didn’t they help? Damn them all!
“Bggggg,” Rawley said. Beg.
He lifted the six-gun very slowly, lining the yawning barrel up not more than a foot from Angel’s head. The barrel wavered, trembled as the awful apparition in front of Angel used every atom of its will to do the bidding of the crazed mind. The skinless thumb curled over the spurred hammer, slowly forcing it back.
Angel’s hand moved.
Up and outward it moved, away from the side of his boot in an underhand throwing movement, releasing the flat bladed, razor-edged knife which Angel had slid from its hiding place. Long, long before this moment he had spent arguing hours with the armorer in the echoing basement of the Justice Building, figuring ways in which a man might carry, undetected, weapons which would not be discovered in the normal, cursory search. One of their ideas had been twin knives, of finest Solingen steel, each perfectly balanced for throwing. It was the right-hand one of these which Angel had plucked from its scabbard between the inner and outer lining of his boot. It sped like a streak of molten silver across the space between the two men and buried itself in Trev Rawley’s throat. The man spun around, eyes bulging as he tried to scream over the awful slicing rigidity inside him, the pistol dropping from his hand as his fingers plucked themselves to bloody ribbons on the wicked blade. He opened his mouth and a horrid gout of thick black blood burst from it, joining the pumping wetness beneath his chin.
His sightless eyes fixed themselves on some distant place and turned inwards upon themselves. Then he fell in a long straight line, going down like some lightning-shattered pine, flattening out and emptying curiously, like a slightly deflated balloon. Angel looked up, helpless now if Fischer’s men used their guns on him. But no shots came.
He thought he could see Doc Day over by the water-trough, his shotgun menacing the men behind it. He thought he could see townspeople running to help Dick Webb. He stood swaying for a moment as people ran to help him and he nodded, as if this confirmed something he had been thinking.
Then he slid softly sideways into the dust, face down in the blood of the last of Ed Fischer’s killers.