The door crashed and shuddered with their weight and he could her her voice: "THE KILLER! YOUR SOULS!"
The door ripped off its hinges and fell straight in, making a flat handclap. Dust puffed up from the floor. Men, women and children charged him. Spittle and stovewood flew. He shot his guns empty and they fell to the floor with a loud thud. He retreated to the back of the shop, shoving over a flour barrel, rolling it at them. They came on, screaming with frantic incoherency. From everywhere, She exhorted them, her voice rising and falling in blind inflections. He pushed shells into hot chambers, smelling the aromas of gunpowder and tonsure, smelling his own flesh as the calluses at the tips of his fingers singed.
He crashed through the back door. The flat scrubland was at his back now. Three men hustled around the corner, with large betrayer grins on their faces. They saw him, saw him seeing them, and the grins curdled in the second before he mowed them down. A women followed them, howling. He blew her backwards and she landed in a whorish sprawl, her skirt rucked up between her thighs.
He went down the steps and walked backwards into the desert: ten paces, twenty. The back door of the barber shop flew open and they boiled out. he opened up. They fell in squats, they fell backwards, they tumbled over the railing into the dust. They cast no shadows in the deathless purple light of the day. He realized he was screaming. He had been screaming all along. His eyes felt like cracked ball bearings. His legs were wood. His ears were iron.
The guns were empty and they boiled at him, transmogrified into Eye and a Hand, and he stood, screaming and reloading, his mind far away and absent, letting his hands do their reloading trick and speak their own tale.
They were in gripping distance. He let them have it, and the ones behind them. Their bodies thumped like scarecrows. Blood and brains flew in streamers. They halted for a moment, startled, the mob face shivering into individual, bewildered faces.
He had time to reload one gun.
Then it was her. She was running at him, waving a wooden cross in each hand. "DEVIL! DEVIL! DESTROY HIM!"
He put a shot into each of the crosspieces, blowing the roods to splinters, and four more into her head. She seemed to accordion into herself and waver like a shimmer of heat.
The tips of his fingers sizzled and burned. Neat circles were branded into the tips of each one.
Their were fewer of them now; He thought they would break with the women dead, but someone threw a knife. The hilt struck him squarely between the eyes and knocked him over. They ran at him in a reaching, vicious clot. He fired his guns empty again, lying in his own spent shells. His head hurt and he saw large brown circles in front of his eyes. He missed with one shot, downed eleven with the rest.
But they were on him, the ones that were left. He fired the four shells he had reloaded, and they were beating him, stabbing him. He threw a pair of them off his left arm and rolled away. His hands began going their infallible trick. He was stabbed in the shoulder. He was stabbed in the back. He was hit across the ribs. A small boy squirmed at him and made the only deep cut, across the bulge of his calf. He turned and blew a hole in his head that made blood echo on the ground behind him.
They were scattering and he let them have it again, back-shooting now. The ones left began to retreat toward the sand colored buildings, and still the hands did their business. His hands were cutting them down as they ran. The last one made it as far as the porch, when his bullet caught the man in the back of the head causing him to stumble into the broken window.
Silence came back in, filling jagged spaces
