Zeke piped up, “You told me that’s who you were.”
“Hush, Zeke,” his mother warned him. There was more she wanted to say to her son, but she turned back to the masked bastard again before he could respond. “All God’s children know it’s what you wanted these folks to think. You wanted them to be afraid of you, but you couldn’t make that happen with your name alone. You might be mean as a snake, but it turned out you’re not as scary as one.
“Hush your mouth, woman. I’ve made this place what it is today.” he said, defensive and angry, and possibly smarting from a slight wound to his pride.
Briar hoped he was smarting. She hoped he was as much like Levi as he acted. She said, “I won’t hush; and you can’t make me, Joe Foster, even if you try. And you might. You’re the kind of man who likes to hurt women, and I hear I’m not the first.”
He barked, “I don’t care what you heard or where you heard it. Except that I do want to know, and I want you to tell me this moment, where you heard that name.”
She stood up fast and straight. Instead of answering his demands, she said, “I want to know who the hell you think you are, dragging us into your little western front, you son of a bitch”—she borrowed Angeline’s favorite label.
When she stood, she could see him as clearly as he saw her, and the triple-barreled shotgun in his hands was something of a terror. It wasn’t aimed at her. It was aimed at Zeke, who, to his credit, had successfully hushed as his mother told him to—though whether it was due to her orders or Minnericht’s amazing firearm, Briar didn’t know and didn’t care.
She’d expected him to threaten her, but Minnericht was smarter than that, and meaner. Well, that was fine. She could be smart and mean, too. She said, “You made this place what it is today? So you think you’ve got some kind of power down here? You sure act like you do, but it’s horseshit, isn’t it? It’s all a big show so people will think you’re the smartest man with the most money. But it ain’t like that. If you were half as smart as you pretended to be, you wouldn’t have to steal Levi’s inventions, or scare up the leftovers from the mining contest. I saw them back there, in your storage room. You think I don’t know where they came from?”
He roared, “Stop talking!”
But she was determined to keep his attention on her instead of on Zeke, and instead of on the slender, boyish old woman who was slinking out of the stairwell to creep up behind him. Briar continued, talking louder so she’d be heard over him, “If you were half the man you pretend to be, you wouldn’t need me to prop up your story—and you wouldn’t need to bring in the boys, like you do. Levi was crazy and he was bad, but he was too smart for you to just pick up his toys and run with them. You need Huey because he’s smart; and you tried to talk my own boy into staying by telling him a pack of lies. But if you’d really made this place what it is, you wouldn’tneed to.”
His aim shifted so that the fat-barreled triple gun pointed between her breasts. She’d never been happier. He said, “You say another goddamned word and I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” she shrieked. She spit out the next part in a frantic, desperate tirade—all in one breath, skipping from pause to pause and trying to keep him angry, because Angeline had almost reached him. “You don’t even know how to work that gun, I bet. You probably didn’t even make it. All the ideas you ever got you stole from Levi, who designed it all and built it all. You know just enough of it to make yourself look like a king, and all you can do is pray to God that no one figures out how useless and weak you really are!”
Beyond roaring, beyond howling, he simply shouted, “Why are you here? Why are either of you here! You never should have come! This wasn’t about you,” he swore. “You should’ve both stayed home, in that disgusting little hovel in the Outskirts. I offered you more—I offered you both much, much more than either of you deserves, and I didn’t have to! I didn’t owe you anything, either one of you!”
She shouted back. “Of course you didn’t! Because you’re not my husband, and you’re not his father, and none of this was our fight, or our problem. But you didn’t figure that out in time, joe Foster.”
“Stop using that name! I don’t want that name; I hate that name, and I won’t hear it! Why do you know that name?”
Angeline was there to answer.
Before Briar could blink, the old woman was on him, wrapped around him as tight as a vise, as mean as a mountain cat, and much, much more deadly. One of her knives was in her hand, and then it was under Minnericht’s chin, in that narrow seam where his skin met his mask.
She used her weight to jerk his head back and stretch that seam, exposing his Adam’s apple and a white stretch of flesh. As she did so, Briar gasped and Zeke leaped over the debris and into the near-shelter of the hole, beside his mother.
Angeline said, “Because of Sarah Joy Foster, whose life you ended twenty years ago.”
And with one slash, swift and muscle-slicingly deep, she cut a line across that seam.
He fired two of the gun’s three barrels, but his aim was lost to imbalance and shock. He spun and stumbled, and slipped and skidded across the scuffed marble floor that was soaked with his own blood. It gushed in a pair of amazing sprays that shot out from both sides of his neck, for Angeline had cut him hard from ear to ear. She rode him like an unbroken horse as he flailed, grasping for the woman, or his throat, or anything to steady himself. But he was bleeding too fast, and too much.
He didn’t have long to struggle, and he wanted to make it count. He tried to turn the gun around in his hands—to aim it back, over his shoulder, but it was too heavy. He’d lost too much blood, and he was too weak. He fell to his hands and knees, and finally, Angeline let go of him.
She kicked the big gun out of his reach and stared down while he sputtered, and while his glorious red coat grew redder still.
Briar turned away. She didn’t care about Minnericht’s death; she cared about Swakhammer, who wasn’t bleeding with quite so much spectacular gore, but whose life was ebbing all the same. It might well be too late already.
Zeke took a step or two back. Until he did so, Briar hadn’t noticed that he’d been all but hiding behind her.
He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again as a bustle of incoming activity prompted his mother to grab, hoist, cock, and aim the Spencer.
“Get down,” she told him, and he did.
Angeline hobbled over to the hole, scaled its lip, and readied her shotgun just in time to point it at Lucy O’Gunning as she stomped around the corner and into the room where the battle had just ended.
Lucy had found or fixed her crossbow, and it was affixed to her arm, ready to fire. She aimed it back at Angeline before she realized who she was. Then she brought it down and said, “Miz Angeline, what are—?” finally, she saw Briar, and she almost laughed when she spoke the rest. “Ain’t this a pairing? I swear and be damned. We don’t have too many women down here inside the walls, but I sure wouldn’t mess with the ones we’ve got.”
Briar said, “You can count yourself in that number, Lucy. But don’t start smiling yet.” She pointed down at Swakhammer, whom Lucy could not see over the edge of fallen wood and wall. “We got trouble, and it’s big, and it’s heavy.”
“It’s Jeremiah!” Lucy exclaimed as she poked her head over the rubble.
“Lucy, he’s dying. We’ve got to get him moved out of here, and back someplace safe.”
Angeline said, “And I don’t know if that’ll save him or not. He’s hurt bad.”
“I can see that,” Lucy didn’t quite snap. “We’ll have to take him… We’ll have to put him…” she said, as if—should she talk long enough—an idea would eventually occur to her. And then, one did. “The mine tracks.”
“That’s a good thought,” Angeline said approvingly. “He’ll be easier to take down than carry up, and if you can get him in a cart, you can roll him all the way back to the Vaults without a lot of trouble.”
“If, if, and if. How are we going to—?” Briar said.
Lucy interrupted. “Give me one minute,” she said. She added to Swakhammer in particular, “Don’t you go anywhere, you big old bastard. You hang on. I’ll be right back.”
If he heard her, he didn’t give any indication of it. His breathing was so shallow it could scarcely be detected, and the twitching of his pupils beneath his eyelids had slowed to a faint roll, corner to corner.
Half a minute later Lucy returned with Squiddy, Frank, and Allen, if Briar remembered the other men’s names correctly. Frank didn’t look so hot. He had a black eye so broad that it nearly made a black nose and a black forehead too; and Allen was nursing a hand that had been injured in some way. But between them, they crawled into the hole, lifted up the armored man, and began to half tow, half carry him out and down.
Lucy said, “We can take him to the lift. At the bottom level, we ought to find mining carts—this is where all the lines ended when Minnericht drew them up. Come on now, and hurry. He ain’t got long.”
“Where will we take him?” Squiddy asked. “He needs a doctor, but—”
And that’s when they noticed the bloody puddle with a masked villain lying dead at its center.
“Jesus. He’s dead, ain’t he?” Frank asked with awe.
“He’s dead, and thank Jesus for it,” Angeline told him. She reached for one of Swakhammer’s dangling feet—the one that did not appear broken. She picked it up and propped it over her shoulder. “I’ll help you carry him. I could use a peek from a doctor myself,” she confessed. “But this corner of of Jeremiah ain’t so heavy. I can help.”
“I know a man,” Lucy said. “He’s an old Chinaman who lives close to here. It’s not medicine like the kind you’re used to, but it’s medicine all the same, and right now, you’ll both have to take what you can get.”
