Beach Day

59: Why Don't You Stand For Something?

She shouldn't take it out of her skin. She knows that. But it isn't like she wants him to be able to use it against her.

She rips it out. Blood spurts down her side, down to her belt and the band of her jeans; she can see the stab wound through the hole in her shirt. Shit. She liked this one, too.

One blade in each hand, she steps backward again. She really did bring a sword to a gunfight. She spots the revolver at his hip; she remembers the shotgun in the pews. She's going to die here.

Oh, well. At least her blood will cry out from the earth.

"Well, Peepaw," she says, weakly. "Here's your sinner. Aren't you gonna make me repent?"

It sounds cool enough. Now is the moment when she should attack, right? He's still close enough to her that it's easy to toss the knife to the floor and ignore its clattering, put both hands on the sword, and use her second action for an attack. There's no penalty on the first attack, after all. And her goal isn't to hit him and do damage; it's to get him away from her so she can think about doing something else and wish she had brought her own gun.

She hits him anyway, forward thrust like she's seen in movies with fencing scenes. A month of training with a sword after asking her aunt for help hasn't made her any better at this. She was always better with a firearm— and, even then, one she made herself.

The sword hits his chest, draws blood through the shirt as she drags it up toward his shoulder. The goal was to knock him back, anyway, and to force him where she wants him.

Where she wants him is on the floor.

This is a gunfight, though, and he draws. In one fluid motion, he pulls the revolver from the holster, cocks the hammer with his thumb, and fires. He doesn't hit her; she manages to knock his hand just enough by gently kicking his wrist that the bullet hits the wall between pieces of glass.

A gunshot is the right thing to bring a rat running through the ajar door. Kepler scrambles in, feet loud on old dirt and stone, bounding forward like she didn't tell him to wait outside.

"Goddammit, Kepler!" she yells.

He doesn't pause running to shrug. He just comes in from the side, bounding for her, in the middle of shaking himself into a transformation.

Peepaw Zacharias is no Matt. He doesn't express shock. He doesn't want to know what Kepler is or why. He just turns the gun around Tiff's boot, recocks, aims, and fires.

The shot hits Kepler in the chest, knocking him back a little. A pathetic squeak escapes him.

And that's when the rage hits.

She drives the blade down into her grandfather, into his abdomen where she knows his small intestine is. Through muscle and viscera— she pulls it out just as quickly, hears it tear, doesn't hear anything. Her ears are ringing. She just smells blood and rain.

But two can play at that game, and the truth is that neither of them die easily. That's the essence of the Cain stock, isn't it? They're marked. Her grandfather lunges forward, grabs hold of the sword around her hands, redirects it— and tackles her through the window.

Glass shatters around her, reducing the visage of Christ to shards of sunbaked yellow, dirt-coated clear, and deep red. She lands on the muddy ground below, outside the window; the shards bite into her calves through the fabric of her jeans. Biting back a whimper, she pushes the sword deeper in, with the hilt between the two of them. That isn't much of a safeguard. He takes it from her just as easily and rips it free, himself.

He holds the sword aloft. It changes in his hands, back to sleek and medieval. He knows how to use it, then; he brings it down on her, but she raises her makeshift cast like that's going to help anything; she drives her knee up, but finds nothing but droopy grandfatherly ass. Her grandfather wrests the blade free of the plaster and holds it against her skin.