Weekly Drabble #284: Bullet Count (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'reload your gun' from Pethrai D'Arkos, bringing us back to the cursed alien ecumenopolis of Horrak-Sarn. Many of our tales have shown what life in the City is like for the survivors, so this looks at the other side of the equation. Enjoy!

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Bullet Count:

Jimmy Ellman crouched behind a broken crate, trying to stop his hands from shaking as he reached into his jacket pocket. If he’d been breathing to begin with, he would have stopped when his fingers found the ragged hole in the fabric, his heart practically leaping into his mouth. His fingers closed around the sole item that hadn’t fallen out as his eyes darted across his surroundings, hoping that some of his pocket’s contents were still nearby.

Nothing.

Still not daring to breathe, he pulled the item out of his pocket and held it up in front of him. One. One bullet left. He’d spent all the cartridges for his sawed-off shotgun, the useless weapon sitting beside him. One bullet. Jimmy was not a man who cried often, but he felt like doing so now.

There were noises that every resident of the City learned by heart, whether you were a slave or a free human. The calls of tar hounds. The soft, shrilling coos of nesting Craven. The sound of a cocking gun... and the soft, clicking hiss of a Watcher that had just spotted prey.

He’d heard that just a few minutes ago, right after they’d lost radio contact with Eric. They’d been sent from Pig’s Head into Kinside. Jimmy and his associates were Espositos, a gang styled after the Italian mafia back on Earth. Their don wanted to talk to the Kings about an alliance.

Ferdinand knew the situation in Kinside was delicate and the godfather of Pig’s Head saw an opportunity there. Pig’s Head had a lot of resources, but Kinside provided safe, reliable access to the surrounding inhabited regions. Before the gang war, it had been a stable trade route for the grounded communities, sitting between the smaller, more scattered townships and the more built-up sections closer to the Masters’ domains on the eastern edge of the City. If Kinside collapsed, it wouldn’t lead to widespread starvation of the complete breakdown of trade, but it would make the local communities’ problems even worse, something that some, like the Uglies or the other surviving participants of the gang war, were hoping for.

Even the Masters wouldn’t mind if Horrak-Sarn’s free humans faced a harder lot in life. Ferdinand and his men wanted to prevent that, but not necessarily through altruism. Jimmy took the smallest of breaths he could, not daring to move. He was Earth-born. Once upon a time he’d been a ‘made man’ in the New York mafia. He thought he’d known what it took to survive on the streets, and he had... but those were streets where the worst thing you would encounter would be another person. He’d known people who’d died before, and died bad. Dean got into a shoot-out with the cops. Ryan had been taken out by a Colombian’s car bomb. Sammy H was knifed in the yard at Riker’s. Those were the risks you ran and he’d accepted them.

He’d never signed up for this shit. Not any of it. Living in the City wasn’t even some kind of primeval hunter-gatherer lifestyle. That, he could have handled. Cavemen had had fires and spears and they’d killed the shit out of every animal that looked at them like a snack. Here in Horrak-Sarn, the only people with fire and spears were the Masters. Everyone else got rocks – or they might as well have.

Jimmy had seen a human centipede – a real one, not the schlock shock-horror shit from that movie – skitter along a wall, grab a full-grown man and carry the screaming bastard off for its next meal. What kind of fucked-up mind thought about creating something like that, let alone actually did it? What fucking psycho would let it loose? Some said the Masters did this because it amused them. Some said this was all part of a plan they had. Some said they did shit like that just to see how far they could push the human form. Others said they were fucking aliens and you couldn’t possibly know why they did what they did. For sure, no one had never asked them about it. If anyone had been dumb enough to do that, they’d probably ended up as the next experiment.

The most fucked thing of all... that business hadn’t been the worst of it. He’d seen a lot, more than he ever wanted to. He thought everything he’d seen and done back on Earth had proven him to be a hard, reliable man, a lieutenant in a powerful family. He’d told his son that monsters weren’t real. There was nothing in the dark that wasn’t there when the light was on. He wanted to go back home and tell his boy that again. He wanted to lie to him and say there was nothing scary about the darkness, but he’d never have that chance. Even if he somehow got out of this situation, there was no escaping the City. More than that, the weight of all he’d seen here was too much for the lie to pass his lips.

In Horrak-Sarn, there were things in the dark. Not just men, but things far, far worse than anything Earth had to offer to the unwary walking the wrong streets. Here, the shadows really did move. The darkness slithered around the little spots of light, seeping in through cracks until it swallowed you whole.

The sun had been setting as he and the other two men, also blooded members of the Esposito family – Pig’s Head’s cosa nostra – had arrived in Kinside. There’d once been a family that owned a trading station on the district’s outskirts. A man, his wife, their three daughters and their son. Marksmen all. Jimmy had heard that one of their ancestors had been a biathlon sharpshooter and passed his skills onto his descendants, who’d kept this road into town secure.

Instead of a family, there’d been six rotting corpses hung from the walls. Each of them had been pocked with arrows, crossbow bolts and bullet holes, bulls-eyes painted onto their torsos. Uglies had taken the station for themselves, using the previous owners for target practice. Jimmy hoped they’d all been dead when they’d been strung up there.

That had set the tone for their arrival in Kinside. The Espositos had known the situation was bad, but knowing it and seeing it were two different things. The turf war had crippled each of the three parties involved; the other two factions weren’t strong enough to hold Kinside against the Uglies, raiders and psychos and the Kings were only surviving by the skin of their teeth. They needed manpower, which the Espositos could provide.

Jimmy’s quick shallow breath stopped once again as he heard the soft clicks and trills of muted conversation. There were a pair of them, moving through the street like cats after a mouse in an alley, and just like cats, Watchers would play with their food. He’d seen it happen. Back in New York, he’d seen some truly fucked things. None compared to the sight of a Watcher disembowelling a man and letting her children practice hunting him like a jaguar using a mauled gazelle to teach her kittens. The man had stumbled and sobbed, trying to hold his guts inside, still thinking he had a chance.

Jimmy didn’t want to go out like that. He wanted it to be quick, clean and he wanted to choose when it happened. He didn’t want to die at the hands of some psycho, alien bootlicker and definitely not some mutant freak of nature. He’d say when. No one else.

Ck-ck-ck-ck-ck.

His heart skipped another beat. That was closer. He knew the Watchers. They could be as silent as the grave when they wanted. He’d been on night duty one time, him and Donny. He’d turned his back. There’d been a feathery fluttering, a draft from beating wings and when he’d turned around, Donny had no head. A few seconds was all it had taken, not even long enough for the other man to cry out.

No, they knew when to be quiet but they were smart. They were trying to spook him. The thing of it was... it was working.

One bullet. Two mutant bitches. His shotgun hadn’t done anything, nor had the first speedloader. The math was fucked.

They’d tried to get in touch with the Kings, but hadn’t even made it that far. Some of the Uglies had still been at the trade station and a brief firefight had broken out between them and the Espositos, forcing the latter to make a hasty escape, several of the mutants hot on their tails in ratcatcher bikes and buggies. Jimmy had thought they’d lost them once they reached a plaza with a large, broken fountain, but they hadn’t. They’d only crossed into someone else’s hunting grounds.

With the shadows getting longer, the Espositos had decided to find somewhere to hold up for the night rather than backtrack through unfamiliar ground and risk running into the Uglies again or being caught in the open when sundown hit. He and Bill had been checking over their ride, a three-seated three-wheeler, gear from the previous rulers of Pig’s Head, the aptly-named Pigmen. Ferdinand and the Espositos had inherited a lot of their equipment when they’d displaced the other gang. It needed a bit of attention to keep running, and they had to make sure it was in good condition for tomorrow.

Eric went ahead to scout out a camp site while Jimmy and Bill checked out the trike and their gear. Eric was smart; he knew not to take chances or get too far from the others, but not all the City’s monsters announced themselves with a roar. Sometimes, like that night when Donny lost his head, all it took was a moment of inattention. Eric stopped responding, not even with a click on the radio to signify that he was there, but needed quiet.

That immediately put Jimmy and Bill on alert, the men ready. They’d expected that the Uglies had come back, but they’d been wrong. It was worse, so much worse and it wasn’t long before they heard it.

Ck-ck-ck-ck-ck.

The noise, like always, came from above. The Espositos looked up. Staring back at them from one of the buildings’ promontories were the blank-faced and red-eyed helms of a pair of Watchers. Women, one with a long, red braid and black-feathered wings and the other with shorter white hair and matching wings. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what happened to Eric.

Jimmy and Bill started shooting, but it was like trying to hit a shadow on the wall as the mutants ducked, flitted and darted with impossible speed. They didn’t even bother shooting back. Jimmy heard Bill die, or at least heard him cry out as one of the Watchers got him. He ran, stumbling, panting and gasping until he’d found this useless refuge. The last thing he heard before he was out of earshot was Bill calling his name.

Eric was gone. Bill was gone. It was just him. He knew what was going to happen next. They were coming closer. They were going to find him and then the knives would have him... the knives and those teeth, slicing and rending. They didn’t care if you were still alive when they started to eat you.

Not me, he thought as he loaded his last bullet into the revolver. Not like that. The gun clicked when he cocked it, the sound giving away his position. He didn’t have to worry about that now. One bullet was all he needed. He wasn’t going to go out like those other poor bastards.

Not me. I get to choose.

He put the barrel of the gun under his chin.