*
Flynn and Chadrick surfaced a quarter mile from where they’d dropped into the shaft. Flynn hefted the still unconscious thugs out of the cart and tied them together at the waist. He then drug them across the rocky ground without care for the sand rash they’d wake up with.
A crowd had gathered round the main mine entrance, and Flynn watched for a moment as Bruce held Putty back while men in red jumpsuits and hard hats descended. Apparently a rescue crew had been assembled to retrieve Chadrick and him.
“Did you lose something?” Flynn asked loudly.
Bruce and Putty turned to them at the same time, and the barkeeper’s hands released Flynn’s older brother.
Putty ran the short distance between them and grabbed Flynn roughly, hugging him harder than when he’d first returned to Soocilla. “Do you know how worried I was?” He asked before he pushed him away at arm’s length and decked him.
“Bloody Nora!” Flynn said, blinking and rubbing the spot on his jaw. He looked up at his brother and glared. “What the hell, Putty?”
“I thought I’d have to go home and tell our mother you got yourself killed.” Putty stalked away, disappearing between the white-washed wood of the houses around the mine entrance.
“Ah, family problems… sometimes I’m glad mine are all off world.” Bruce stared after Putty, his face a clear contradiction of his words. “We were trying to find more men to head to the secondary shaft. Looks like you weren’t in need of rescuing.”
“Well, the gesture counts.” Flynn nodded to the group of men still working at the mine’s main entrance.
“Them? They don’t give two ostrich turds about you.” Bruce turned to look over his shoulder with a smile and then swung back to Flynn and his dragged thugs. “Let’s get these two put away before they wake up.”
The town was quiet, its dusty streets vacant after the blast in the mine as Bruce led them into what looked like it should have been a land right’s office.
A square of cells occupied the center of the one room building. “This is the jail?”
“We didn’t have one at first. Still don’t have a real sheriff. Mostly we put drunks in here to sober up. Before the Refuti Mining Corp – they call themselves the RMC – showed up, we didn’t have too much in the way of crime. The devious tend to leave on their own.”
Rows of gun lockers lined the back wall, and Flynn looked from Bruce to them with a disbelieving scowl. “If you don’t have an issue, why do you need that many guns?”
“Only one of them actually has weapons. The rest we just use for storage.”
Flynn dropped the two miscreants on the floor. Kicking their legs inside the cell and shoving them across the hard wood like ungainly sacks of flour. He slammed the cell door shut and heard two pairs of uneven footsteps behind him.
Putty looked as though he’d rather be back in the bar than dealing with his idiot younger brother, and Flynn couldn’t help but smile. His brother’s scowl deepened and Flynn decided they’d both live longer if he stopped antagonizing his brother.
Beside Putty, a tall woman in a ruffled pink shirt surveyed the unconscious, bound men with a grimace. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“They tried to kill us. Forgive me for not finding a feather bed for them.” Flynn was not in a mood to deal with looky-loo townsfolk. “Who the hell are you.”
“Henri,” Bruce jumped, in gesturing to Chadrick first while the woman called Henri held her own in a staring match against Flynn. “This is my friend Chadrick I’ve told you about, and the Monroe brothers. Like I said before, they’re here to help.”
Henri didn’t take her eyes off Flynn.
“This is Henrietta. Henri. She’s basically our mayor and governor, all rolled into one… keeps this place in order.”
Henri’s eyes finally slid from Flynn’s to the two men lying on the cell’s floor. Her jaw clenched, brown eyes deathly flat, she stepped toward the bars. “They set off the explosions?”
“Yeah, they’re the ones. Flynn and Chad caught them in the mine with explosives on ‘em. They were talking about their job and how they’ll be living here once it was done. I’ve never seen them before.”
“And they have the same mark as the guy in the morgue.” Chadrick confirmed for the rest of them. “If that brand is from the RMC then they are definitely Refuti’s men.”
Flynn sat on the empty desk in the corner and looked over the small group. “If what you’ve said about their tactics so far is true, Giuseppe Refuti won’t want these two alive. He’s going to come for them…. and we have to be ready. This is your chance to show them this town is not full of the weak creatures they think. You’ve got to show them you can, and will, fight.
“They’ll want these two back, all right, or dead.” Putty turned from the window and leveled his own gaze on all of them. “Because alive and captured, they’re a liability. If you lose this fight, you lose this war.”
“Well, we can’t take the fight to them. Apparently the Refuti bought the remnant terraforming base on the moon. They’ve been this close for months,” Bruce said, holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart.
Flynn clenched his jaw to keep from asking why he was just being told this now.
Chadrick looked at the two men in the cell. “They were probably biding their time and looking for ways to drive you out. They couldn’t be openly aggressive. Giuseppe wouldn’t want to draw the Colarium’s attention to this scheme.”
Flynn watched as Putty leaned against the door frame, his eyes falling on each of them in turn. He was not the brother Flynn had left behind.
Putty settled on Flynn for a brief moment before turning back to the others. “He’s right. They can’t let you have any proof.”
There was a finality in his words that set Flynn on edge. When they had a moment in private, he’d have to talk to his older brother, though he had a feeling neither of them would enjoy it.
“Then we need to be ready for them.” Bruce pulled open one of the gun cabinets, unlocked the interior gate and liberated a host of firearms. He set each on the desk beside Flynn.
Turning back to them, the Barkeeper nodded toward the cabinet beside him. “Somebody want to help me move this in front of that side window?”
Chadrick and Henri moved to help him, and soon the others started shoving the other lockers to block the other windows. Flynn looked at the faces around him. They were all uncomfortable with what was being asked of them. But he knew for a fact they’d be more uncomfortable when the RMC ran them off the planet and they had to find a new home. Vagrants were never welcomed with open arms.
Flynn stepped out on to the porch and found Seamus watching him with the curious intensity that only little boys could muster.
“They’re coming, aren’t they?” he asked, adjusting his small red cowboy hat.
Flynn nodded, turning to look up at the hazy moon, barely visible in the pre-dusk sky. On their way down to the planet, Flynn hadn’t spared it a thought. Now, it gave him the same feeling as finding a beehive in a tree… while you were climbing it.
“I wanna help.” Seamus looked up at him with a stony determination.
“Kid, you’re too young. This is serious and you don’t want to get involved,” Flynn said, half annoyed, half impressed by the little guy’s tenacity.
“They killed my folks,” Seamus said, fighting back tears. “This is more my fight than it is yours.”
Flynn swallowed, hard, “Fine. You go tell everyone to head for a safe place. Let them know something bad is coming.”
“What if they don’t believe me?”
“Make them.” Flynn held the boy’s eyes for a moment, and then Seamus was gone, running through the dusty street like a bat out of a mineshaft.
They were all going to have to start thinking of this as a war, their war, or they were going to die – down to the last man who didn’t bear the double R brand.