Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

What follows is a tiny slice of my latest novel, Only the Young Die Good, five years in the making (owing to my 2014 stroke) and now 95% finished. It continues the adventures my vampire-next-door J. Gifford and his seductive lady-love (and sire) Surica Fieraru. Anton is J.’s best friend, the New Prospect, Colorado Chief of Detectives, and General Grenville Dodge is the 187-year-old villain. Please enjoy …

Chapter Twenty: The Silent Gunfight

Friendship is born at that moment when
one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought
that no one but myself …”
— C.S. Lewis

It promised to be a bitter fight—or possibly not, because Dodge wanted Surica alive, Chalcedonia as well, and maybe even me, although I promised myself to be more trouble to him than I was worth. Neither of the redheads would ever be taken again; they were each to die before that happened. Grenville Dodge’s minions might end up fighting us all hand-to-hand—not my favorite form of conflict resolution.

With all the sound and fury around us, I kept waiting to hear sirens, but none ever came. Anton’s self-assigned “battle-station” was roving, making sure that everybody was okay and had whatever they needed—within our limited resources. If we lived through this, my next house was gonna be a fucking stone-walled castle with a real drawbridge.

I was bravely hiding behind my desk beside Surica. With a grim look, Anton shook his head at me. “No J., no cavalry coming, I’m afraid. His Dishonor the mayor and and my esteemed boss, the Chief of Police, will not be sending anybody to your door, because the Struldbrugs, who have been collecting information on just about everything and everybody for roughly a century and a half, know their deepest, darkest proclivities and will have threatened to expose them. Maybe bribed them, as well.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “And do you know their deepest, darkest proclivities?” I asked, feigning innocence.

He nodded. “Some of them—I don’t want to tell you because I don’t want those words in my mouth—but I always tried to keep my children away from them. Either of you need ammo?”

“I think perhaps I need a somewhat more powerful weapon,” said green-eyed Surica shyly, in her charming Romanian accent, shocking me to the core. She had carried and relied on her little Beretta Model 34 .380 for more than seventy years, even recovering it from her captors, the Nazis and the communists in turn.

Anton nodded and drew his Glock Model 22 from a shoulder holster. “Here, take this. Forty caliber. I have my old service revolver right here, a S&W Model 28 .357 Magnum.”

“You’re sure … ?” she asked, surprised.

“Absolutely. As sure as I can be.”

At that precise moment, gunfire from the hall doorway whizzed past his face, taking a bite from the brim of his hat, and lodging in the wall just under my huge Bowie knife, which fell off its wooden pegs with a clatter and stuck, point-first, in the hardwood floor. The three of us reacted as one, Anton with his big old wheelgun (I’d always admired the Model 28 “Highway Patrolman“), Surica with the trim, competent .40 he’d just handed her (I noticed she kept her Beretta in her other hand), and me with the 12-gauge shotgun, its magazine filled with shells stuffed with fine silver chain. Our opponent, some kind of submachine gun in his long-nailed hands, slammed against the wall behind him and fell, emitting smoke, to the floor.

This was going to be hell on the woodwork.

Suddenly, the doorway was jammed again, with only semi-human faces, spitting and snarling and screaming at us. There was no telling the males from the females. One of them raised an outsized revolver—one of those clunky .45/410 things—and had to be put down before it could pull the trigger. More pushed forward to fill the ranks. Then I shot as many of its companions as I could, with Surica and Anton chiming in. Together we made a hell of a percussion section. We heard a lot of gunfire from the living room where Quinn and his pair of feisty females apparently had problems of their own to contend with.

No sooner had we dealt with the nasty faces threatening us from the doorway, than three more appeared all at once with a new tactic. They seemed to leap through the air, across the room, toward the desk we were crouching behind. By then I was out of shotgun shells and about to switch to my little Detective Special, Anton was caught recharging his .357 with a speed-loader, Surica got off a shot or two with his autopistol, emptied her own, and ran dry. I snatched up the Bowie knife stuck in the floor behind me, and swung the foot-long slab of blackened steel by its eight-inch handle with both hands like a baseball bat, just as the three hurtling minions reached us. The heavy, razor-sharp weapon decapitated them all; I never even felt the resistance of the second and third necks. Sometimes I surprise myself.