Guns of Mars 67
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 19.3
Halak prayed to every god he could name, calling out to them with a throat burnt raw. Despite being raised and lowered again and again to the deck with a painful regularity, he clung to the rails by raw strength and sheer will. The muscles of his arms and shoulders were ablaze. His sinews stretched to what he swore was near breaking point. His legs flailed behind him, caught in the fury of the storm until he feared they might be clawed from his body as though by some unseen fury.
The vessel slid then, its keel burrowing into the loose sand. It raced along like this for what felt like an eternity until it came to a violent stop. It came hard about in a slewing stop and teetered, threatening to flip full over, at the lip of a shallow draw. The wind subsided some then, allowing the ship to slide sideways down the slope to the floor of the draw where it came to rest wildly canted but upright.
His head bared, the headdress wrenched from his scalp by the maelstrom, Halak released his death grip on the railing. He slid down the tilted deck to the sand at the bottom of the draw to crawl clear of the wreck. The world was suddenly quiet, the great storm moving away over the plain.
Only two of his men at arms remained. They clambered from the hatch on the main deck and tumbled down to join their master. Both men were breathless, their normal ruddy complexions still pallid with fear. They informed him that the other of their number lay dead in the hold, his skull crushed where he’d been thrown against the bulwark. As evidence of this, both survivors were spattered with sticky blood that was soon crusted over by blowing sand
The hooded man disembarked with a deal more dignity, sliding down on the soles of his boots to step out onto the sand and walk toward them at an easy pace.
“This adventure has not gone as you promised, Bhar,” Halak said, standing upright on still-shaky legs.
“An unexpected setback, to be sure,” the hooded man said, glancing toward the swirling tower of sand now racing southward.
“Setback? You mean the end of us.”
“How so?”
“You assured me that five days supply of food and water would suffice,” Halak said, his eyes red and skin bleeding from the hail of sand that had lashed him.
“There are less of us now,” the hooded man said with a withering smile.
“We are still many days walk away from Yttrium and afoot. Many more days than even four men could survive on the provisions that remain.”
“Then perhaps we might recalculate that equation.” The smile faded from the hooded man’s lipless mouth.
His hands were filled with barking pistols including a freakishly withered appendage that had produced a third, smaller caliber firearm from somewhere within his robe.
Halak and his underlings fell before they could draw their own weapons. The two red men dropped, holed through the ribs by the larger bore guns. Xenbah Halak had been struck by the smaller arm and spun to the sand where he lay with his breath coming in wet rasps.
He looked up, his vision hazy, as the shadow of the ghostly pale figure fell over him.
“You’ll die out here,” he said in a spray of blood from his clenched teeth.
“Not before you,” the hooded man said as he trained the barrel of the gun to aim between the First Born’s eyes.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
