Man with No Name: A Nanashi Novella by Laird Barron Page B

he kept under his armpit. The guy behind the sofa was on empty and Nanashi vaulted it, knelt and one! two! piston-fast, stabbed the gangster in the throat as he struggled to reload. The guy kept fumbling with the cartridge and swatting at the blood pouring down the front of his suit, until his movements were slow motion. Nanashi forgot him and kept going, scuttling on all fours toward the miniature banyan tree in its wicker pot and directly for the gangster ridiculously exposed as he cowered there. The gangster was a kid, hard and cruel, his face already nicked and scarred. The kid lined up the barrel of his nickel-plated automatic and uncapped however many rounds he had left as Nanashi floated toward him, moving with the rock and sway of a hominid torn from a primordial hunting ground and projected across time and space into that ruined living room--
    I don’t recognize this place, Nanashi said. The beach continued to unreel. The landscape warped and refracted black and white, a negative. The ocean was blinding white.
    This is the Maze, Muzaki said. His face shimmered a dull ivory and suggested that while the wounds had sealed he remained a bloodless, shambling thing that should not be. What is that? He pointed toward the shivering black spot that drew ever closer.
    Nanashi strained to see and when he did he understood that a heavy stone had been rolled aside to reveal a secret nest that should’ve remained hidden. He fell to his knees and began to shriek, pop-eyed and insane.
    Muzaki said, Don’t be afraid, my nameless friend. You’ve done well and I’m here. I’m here for you. I’ve always been.
    --goon number six was too frightened to aim straight and his shots went wherever errant shots go and then Nanashi slammed a knee into his chin and there went teeth, tongue, a yolk of blood and spit. The kid sprawled and Nanashi kicked him in the neck and again in the base of the spine. Bone crunched and the kid became still.
    Nanashi straightened and breathed hard. He wiped his face with his sleeve.
    “Are you finished?” Susan Stucky hadn’t moved from her position in the hallway. She dropped her cigarette butt and carefully negotiated the battlefield to the record player and yanked the cord out of the wall. A man who’d survived his horrible injuries groaned where he lay in the fetal position in a thickening pool of blood. Otherwise the house was quiet. The actress was alone at last, or so Nanashi surmised. Lost to her Hollywood cliques, the tabloids no longer bothered to mention her, an alien in alien land and doubly estranged by her own wealth, her princess-style investiture at Castle Muzaki. She went over and peered at the wounded man who stirred and raised his bloodied hand to her in supplication. She stepped back and gave Nanashi a look.
    He retrieved his pistol and reloaded it without thinking; his mind sprinted ahead, calculating avenues of escape, vectors of pursuit, safe-houses, odds of prolonged survival. Violence, its preparation and aftermath, was his meditation. He didn’t waste another bullet, simply hefted the fractured jade bust of some ancient dead god of the sea and smashed the gangster’s skull with such force the man’s glazed eyes started from their sockets and splashed against Nanashi’s shoe. When Nanashi turned, he saw Susan Stucky kneeling by her dead dog and stroking its fur.
    “All right,” she said with dull satisfaction at the mess he’d made of her enemies. “These poor saps never stood a chance, huh? Good for us that they trusted you. You jumped across that line awfully quick.”
    There was a psychedelic moment where he relived every slashed throat, every gouged eye, every severed finger, every beating he’d administered purely upon orders from his Sworn Family for reasons he seldom understood. He’d once ripped a businessman’s tongue free with pliers and fed it to him. He’d skinned a rival underboss alive with the edge of a trowel. He’d shoved a prostitute from a high