Page 86 of Ransom
Ransom got to him first.
He headbutted the guy holding him down, spun, and kicked him hard in the balls. He came around swinging and managed to get his gun free. There was a pop pop pop, the sound of a revolver firing three quick rounds, and three men went down with brand new holes in them that nature didn't intend to be there.
Otis spun, and I saw his face change when he registered what was coming. He swung wild. Ransom ducked it without looking and hit him in the gut, then brought a hammer fist down on the inside of Otis's wrist. The knife dropped. Ransom caught it out of the air. Otis turned to run and didn't make it two steps before Ransom had a fistful of his shirt and dragged him back. He spun Otis around to face him. Then he looked past Otis. At me. On my knees in the dirt with my arm sleeved in blood and my face wrecked. He looked at me for a second longer than he needed to, and his face did something I'd never seen on it before. Then his eyes came back to Otis, and whatever softness had been there a second ago was gone clean out of him.
"You shouldn't have touched him," Ransom said, quiet enough I almost didn't catch it, and drove the blade through Otis's temple.
Otis's eyes went in two different directions at once. His jaw came open and stayed open. Ransom held him there, close, like he wanted to make sure Otis felt every inch of it on the way out. Then he pulled the knife free, and Otis dropped at his feet like a sack of feed off a tailgate.
The last two ran.
Ransom let them go.
He stood in the middle of the road, the knife still in his hand, breathing hard. Blood ran down his forearms and his shirt. Four bodies lay in the dirt around him.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I sat back on my heels, my hand pressed against my ribs.
"Winston," he started, walking toward me. "You all right?"
"Think so," I managed.
He went down on one knee in the dirt next to me and started looking me over. "Your arm."
"It ain't that bad," I said. It was the truth. The ribs were the worst of it, and they were probably not broken. Probably.
He laid the back of his hand against my cheek, light, and the blood on his knuckles smeared against my jaw. I leaned my face into his hand.
"I thought…" he started, then trailed off and shook his head. "Can you make a quarter mile?"
"What's in a quarter mile?"
"Coyote."
I closed my eyes for a second, got my wits about me, and nodded. "Probably."
"Good."
He hauled me up under one arm. My ribs hurt in a new direction, and I grunted. The world tilted hard and came back. His shirt smelled like blood and sweat and Otis's last bad day. I leaned into him, and we started walking.
The walk to Coyote'swas a quarter mile of God testing me to see what I had left, and I'll tell you right now, it wasn't much.
Ransom had me up under one arm and a fist in the back of my shirt, and he took most of my weight without making a thing about it. There's a way a man helps you when he wants you to notice and a way he helps you when he doesn't, and Ransom Lanza had been the second kind every day I'd known him.
My ribs ached. My arm bled into my sleeve, and my sleeve stuck to my arm. My nose was packed full of blood, and what wasn't packed in there ran down the back of my throat.
The ground rose up sideways, and Ransom hauled me back upright before I hit it.
"Eyes up, Ranger."
"I had 'em up."
"Have 'em higher."
"Yes sir," I said.
I'd built Coyote's place in my head out of bones and lean-tos and dead-thing wind chimes, because that's what his camp hadlooked like the time he'd buried me up to my neck in sand. So when Ransom walked me around a finger of red rock and there was a cave there with smoke coming out of a crack above it, I was more surprised than I should have been.
