asked question , “The girl wedged in the middle of that group is Patch. She’s our martial arts expert. Does things even I don’t believe when I see it.”
Then Chris noticed another man standing off to the side. Apart from the usual leather get up and a bald scared head, he had what appeared to be a metal shaped segmented right hand and a bloody big crab like claw instead of a left hand. He chuckled, “I’d like to see her do some things.” He spoke with a cockney accent.
He ran his tongue subjectively over his top lip. “ Girl like that would make a fine …”
Anvil glanced disapprovingly towards him, “That thug is called Heartless. He has no conscience at all as well as no hands. He does and says things that get him in trouble from time to time. How he was chosen is besides me but he was. ”
The girl called Patch smiled a wicked sweet smile, “He keeps that up Anvil and it won ’ t be just his hands he looses.”
Chris noticed for the first time that she had a set of wicked looking razor thin daggers tucked sideways under her narrow twisted leather sash around her slim waist , as well as a pair of rice flails strapped to her right thigh.
Heartless pretended to protect his privates and chuckled nastily before holding up his mechanical hands, “The one of the left can snip through quarter inch steel. The one on the right looks like a normal hand but like doctor No it can crush a golf ball to dust.”
He chuckled, “But luckily for my own balls sake, I can also pick up a raw egg without cracking it.”
Chris couldn’t help himself, “ A metal sea shell.”
Heartless stopped flexing his hand, “What?”
Chris grinned, “Doctor No crushed a metal sea shell. Odd Job crushed the golf ball.”
Patch laughed, “That’s Heartless alright. A real odd job if I ever saw one.”
The others joined in laughing at his misfortune. Heartless glared back at Chris but said nothing.
‘ Made no friends there then .’ He thought.
Anvil stopped smiling to nod towards the other female who was now perched on the arm rest of his settee . Chris was looking at her wicked looking black hunting bow . It was nearly six feet long and reminded him of t h e old hunting bows used way back when. Robin Hood sprang to mind , b ut this was mat black instead of Yew . “The lady with the bow is called Huntress. Don’t let her white eyes fool you. She can out see a hawk and can hit anything she can see. Huntress is our tracker as well as our long distance silent markswoman.”
Chris ga ped at her blank white eyes up close but then did a double take. Her long white hair was really actually moving on its own! There was no wind blowing in here yet it moved around as if she was under water.
Huntress smiled and offered Chris a nod of acknowledgement, “I can put an arrow through a one inch hoop at three hundred feet. This is a very special compound bow, based on the English Long Bow. It’s the most powerful bow in the world and only I can pull it.”
Anvil pointed out the cowboy, “Another one just as deadly at long range, t he gun f ighter ’s called Bulls eye. ”
The man pulled a gun free with lightning speed, spinning it this way and that, both horizontally and vertically, “ Kn ew John Wesley Hardin, nearly as fast as me. Billy the Kid was nothing but a back shooter as was the James boys. Old Doc Holliday, he was fast but died sort of early , mad as a coot, loved killing . Me ? I kept myself to myself , people don’t know your name they can’t come a lookin for you. After two or three try and prove they’re faster than you, you either end up loving the kill or hate it. I hated it. I ended up in a Wild West show run by Bill Cody . Then one day a kid came back stage, he said he knew who I really was and pulled a cheap rusty old Remington on me. Said I’d killed his pa. I could have shot him dead a dozen times by the time he’d cocked the thing