Then silence.

The Dark Man turned again, put one gun carefully down on the table and touched his hand to his girl’s naked back. She stirred, spat several times, and uttered a low groan which the Dark Man answered with some gentle pats. “Easy,” he murmured. His eyes never left the Pack and they never stayed too long on any one face. “Easy, Raven. On your feet.”

The girl clawed back off the table, away from Dawg’s half-headed corpse, and fell on her butt on the floor. The impact knocked another groan from her, this one melting into a sob mid-way.

The Dark Man considered the room while she struggled to compose herself, and then finally nudged his girl with his foot. “You’re done,” he said. “Up.”

She took her hands away from her ears and stood, shaking slightly.

The Dark Man shook his gun like a warning finger. “Get these away from them,” he ordered.

She moved to obey. Heck, nearest to her, tried to reach his out for her and the Dark Man put a bullet right between his bulging eyes. The girl flinched back, swiping at the spray that spattered red over her bare skin, and stepped away from the body as it dropped. She hesitated, then turned to Fat Joey.

He opened his jacket and held it open so she could fetch out his revolver for herself.

It didn’t take long to disarm the Pack. The girl piled the guns and knives on the center table, next to Dawg’s body. It made a pretty good pile. The Dark Man put down his remaining gun and exchanged it for another. While he did this, Fat Joey, still seated at the table, finally got a good look at the Dark Man’s hands and discovered just exactly what was wrong with them.

They had only three fingers. Not as though he was mutilated, but as though he only came with three fingers. There was a claw, thick and sharp and cruelly carved, on each tip. In order to fire the guns at all, he’d had to hold them almost sideways, holding the barrel with one finger, aiming alongside with another, and working the trigger with the thin tip of his thumb.

The fucker wasn’t crazy. The fucker wasn’t high.

The fucker wasn’t human.

The Dark Man turned his eye on Joey, sitting there right at the level of the Dark Man’s elbow, and his eyes were empty and considering. “Get up,” he said.

Joey got up.

“Put the dead there,” the Dark Man ordered, tossing his chin at the bar. He put one hand over Dawg’s back. “Leave this one.”

Joey took hold of Heck’s feet and started dragging.

“Line up,” the Dark Man said to the rest of them. “Get on your bellies. Keep your hands flat before you. Females, come here.”

Sue-Eye and Cammy came, obedient as dogs. The bar whores hesitated, but when the Dark Man shot them his irritated glare, they came and huddled at his side, shivering. Sheila was crying, both hands over her mouth to muffle the sound of it.

When the bodies were out of the way and Joey had lined up with the rest, the Dark Man tucked his gun back into his pants and sat down, looking thoughtful, a man patiently puzzling out a thorny problem. “Raven,” he said.

The girl tensed and took a half-step towards him.

“Bring my pack and then find something…” The Dark Man trailed off, then held up his hands, wrists together. “I want them like this.”

“Bound,” the girl said, and looked around, a little helplessly. “You want them bound. Okay.” She went to the Dark Man’s booth, brought him his dark pack, and then took a few aimless steps towards the bar.

Sue-Eye cleared her throat quietly, attracting both the girl’s and the Dark Man’s attention. “Charlie’s got a tool box in the back room. There ought to be some duct tape in it.”

The girl looked relieved. “Okay,” she said again, and went off, returning in a minute or two with the silver roll around one wrist like a bracelet.

The Dark Man looked on with interest as his girl bound each pair of male wrists and ankles with tape, making sure she had good contact with bare flesh. She wrapped their mouths as well, and the Dark Man leaned back when this was done and turned his full attention on the women.

“Should I bind them, too?” the girl asked.

“Mmm.”

The girl didn’t move until the Dark Man nodded. As she bent over Sue-Eye, the Dark Man studied the men again. “You,” he said at last, leaning forward and giving Juicer a thin smile. “You touched her first, after these,” he added, dismissively patting Dawg’s dead arm and thumbing back at the bar where Heck was stacked with the other bodies.

Fat Joey felt something damp seeping into his thigh and turned his head to the right enough to see Ross. The low dog was shaking violently, trying to speak around his duct tape gag.

The Dark Man stood up, strode over and plucked Juicer out from the rest of the men. He backed up a few steps, ran an eye over the row of captives as though silently inquiring whether they could all see him clearly.

There was no sound. Fat Joey could see the grit on Charlie’s filthy floors puffing out with each ragged breath he took, but he couldn’t hear even that. It was as though what he was seeing was so awful, his eyes needed to borrow fuel from his ears to process it all.

The Dark Man bent Juicer double, caught him by the high collar of his jacket, and ripped the back of his head off with a brittle seashell-snap. Juicer’s body convulsed, and Juicer’s eyes went wide. Juicer wriggled, fast at first, and then slower as the Dark Man dropped him and held up the chunk of Juicer’s skull and brain and hair.

Sound exploded back into the room. Tape-muffled screams and the sobbing of the bar whores assaulted Joey’s senses, but he couldn’t focus in on them. Dimly, the thought came to him that even if he weren’t taped up, he wouldn’t be able to run. He couldn’t even close his eyes. He could do nothing but watch.

The Dark Man returned to his table and sat, pulling out another pen-like device, a little thicker than the first. He used it to extract something that looked a little like the pink eraser off a new pencil. The Dark Man capped the device and waited, looking over his females again, until something beeped. Then he uncapped the pen-thing, ejected a gummy-looking, pink raison onto the floor and turned his eyes on Ross.

Ross was shrieking behind his duct-tape gag, and when the Dark Man stood up again, Ross tried to caterpillar himself across the floor to the door. The Dark Man slowed his step, keeping pace beside him until he had reached the exit. There he leaned against the wall and watched Ross struggle to raise up enough to rub his jaw on the doorknob in futile effort to open it.

He chuckled, sighed, and then took Ross by the shirt and dragged him easily back to the center table. The Dark Man faced a couple of chairs together and dropped Ross into one of them. He sat down in the other, leaned back, propped one arm causally on Dawg’s dead back and smiled.

“Yes,” he murmured. Fat Joey could see the Dark Man’s eyes like empty sockets, and teeth, teeth like a wolf. “I saw you. I saw you put your hands on my Raven. I saw you fuck her mouth. I saw you fuck her tits. I saw you piss in her hair just to hear your dead commander laugh.”

The Dark Man raised Dawg’s diminished head and waggled it at Ross. Thick blood poured down onto the table and splashed out over the road brother’s legs. The Dark Man smiled again. “I think he’s through laughing.”

Ross was gibbering behind his gag and after a moment’s savored contemplation, the Dark Man reached out one claw and punched a hole in it so he could speak.

“Please, mister…mister, I’m real sorry.”

The Dark Man was nodding, almost with sympathy. “You know, I think you are, at that.” Then he reached across, seized Ross by his hair, bent him forward and cracked his skull open.

A part of Ross’s brain came away with the knobby hunk of skull and that was bad. The scream shrieking high only to lower into drooling bubbles was worse. Much worse.