The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination by R.F. Bright Read Free Book Online Page B

gushing and throttled back.
    Pastor Scott’s voice filled with impotent indignation. “Four hundred years of building this country, all sold off to pay for five decades of corruption and incompetence from short-sighted, double-dealing reptiles . . .”
    This was all just noise to Max, but he kept a read on MacIan.
    MacIan looked straight at him. “What d’you think?”
    Max made a ‘who me’ face and scrunched up his shoulders.
    MacIan seemed to be looking across time itself. Slowly his gaze returned and he aimed it at Max like a tractor beam.
    Max had never seen this before — absolute defiance.

    * * *
    A mile or so before Lily, MacIan spotted what the Lilians called the Back Side, a cluster of odd structures on the opposite side of the hill from the village proper. These structures spiraled along beautifully laid retaining walls that curved down the hillside, creating lovely terraces. The expensive bricks, baked to perfection and glazed for eternity, were the final contribution from the nine good houses the good people of Lily had carefully dismantled and repurposed. Seven other good houses were turned over to seven families who were willing to fix them up and live in them, Max and Fred among them.
    MacIan chuckled at the sight of a pig-pen with a fancy terracotta roof and Romanesque columns at each corner. Several terraces wrapped around a hayloft made entirely from hand-carved doors of the finest hardwoods and stained glass. The larger of two tool sheds was clad in Edwardian, dragon’s scale siding with an elaborately trimmed porch. Even Fred’s purely utilitarian network of drainage tubes was done with great care. MacIan had seen many similar set-ups, and not just in America. This was one of the best. Well thought out, perfectly executed and it was beautiful. Why not? All the material was just sitting there.
    A wireframe of the hillside below popped onto the heads-up display and the camera zoomed in on a Browning M2, mounted behind the smaller tool shed’s gingerbread-trimmed eyebrow window.
    He glanced over his shoulder.
    Fred broke out his most cantankerous grin. “Fully defensible.”
    “How many do you feed?”
    “We feed everyone we can.”
    “That’s nice of you.”
    “Civility is vanity’s first victim,” said Fred.
    Max rolled his eyes. “He’s a poet.”
    “Buried in the graveyard of ambition,” MacIan finished the verse, and now he and Fred were true friends. Max drew a blank; he’d never heard the second line.
    Fred could not have been happier. He hated it when people didn’t get his jokes. “We feed . . . probably around ninety or so. It all depends. It’s not hard. That’s not much food to produce these days.”
    Max said, “With our own inventions, we’ve got a productivity multiplier of eleven to one. It doesn’t take much when one can feed eleven.”
    MacIan was impressed. “Why all the firepower?”
    “You’re only seeing this now that the work is all done,” said Fred. “It took a long time, but we were extremely prudent cannibals. Nothing went to waste.”
    Pastor Scott seemed to know what lay behind MacIan’s questions. “We had to protect what we worked for. Our families depended on us.”
    Max was not so squeamish. “We buried them there at the bottom of the hill, in that field over there, more than two hundred,” he said. “Not our fault we worked hard enough and smart enough to make it. We did what we had to do.”
    MacIan really liked this kid. “There are monsters in this world.”
    Max feared he’d sounded a little too uncaring. “That was how it was,” he said apologetically.
    “Can’t blame a man for his bubble,” replied MacIan.
    The Peregrine lifted up and over the Back Side then dipped straight into the village square, where everyone was waiting for the show to resume. The landing did not disappoint. The adventurous four stepped out and MacIan whispered, “Triage.” The shelf with the dead body slid open. MacIan rolled the body over, reached