Life and Limb (The Ebon Chronicles) Read Online Free

distance, "Get back here, honeymuffin.  I only shot the horse."
    Shakily I raised the pistol at the shadowed silhouette still approaching, and saw the girl's face.  She had a casual smile, one that didn't match the fact that I had just pulled the hammer back on the seven shooter pointed at her face.
    "Mister I know the look of a man who wants to shoot a young girl, and you ain't got it," she said in a vexingly singsong tone, gently reaching across and taking the blood slick pistol out of my hand without effort.  In the world I was in, between life and death, between consciousness and sleep, I saw her turn holding the dripping pistol above her head and shouting, "Pa!  He had a gun on him!"
    There was silence for a few moments more as the man started moving near us,
    "Well that's nice for him, but we ain't thieves.  You best give it back."
    The girl, Freezy Breezy, looked at me holding the pistol loosely in her hand.  After an additional moment's consideration she leaned down and handed it back with something not entirely unlike concern on her face.
    "You okay, Riderman?" she said.
    Speech was beyond me as pain raced up and down the whole of my body, each breath reminding me of my injury with an unfamiliar clicking sensation between two splinters of bone running into one another.  I leaned back and dropped the pistol onto my chest.  Soon I had the barrel of a rifle pressed against my forehead.  It was hot, still burning from the shot that had fired out of it moments before.
    "Just lay still there for a minute while I think this thing through.  We ain't gonna hurt you more.  We come for the horse."
    "Lotta blood, Pa," Freezy Breezy said as she jabbed a pole under the horse near my leg, "Some of it might be his.  I don't know much about fixing a broken leg."
    I think it was when they first tried to lever the horse up off the ground that I blacked out.  Darkness swallowed me easily, like a midnight tornado.  I don't know if I dreamed.  It must have been only a few seconds later that I woke up, grasping at the loose sleeve of a blouse in my hand and crying out as a sickening click reached my ears.
    "Ask your sisters how they're coming along.  I'm done with you," I heard Pa say from further down, hovering above the pain in my left leg.  My head dropped unceremoniously onto the ground, and I could see the girl run off out of sight.  Pa continued, "Why a sensible man such as yourself would be riding a horse to the Dustlands when there's hungry folk about I never will understand.  Hunger does strange things."
    "Who are you?" I asked between quick breaths shooting in and out in time with the jabs of pain.
    "Jester Breezy," the man said extending a wet and sticky hand.  Realizing it was unclean, slick with my own blood, he rubbed it on his pant leg, "Good thing you were out.  I just set your shin and got some corn-still on it.  It might get infected, but out here with a bum leg that's the least of your worries."
    He wrapped thick cotton strips across the wound in an odd pattern.  After a few wraps he added a pair of thin iron poles, ridged and elastic like rebar, placing them carefully on either side of what was apparently a compound fracture.  I'd suffered fractures before in the waste, but never alone.  The first time I had been carried back on a wagon by my companions.
    "Ripper dogs," he said, shaking his head as he tightened the bandage into his odd intricate pattern, "They smell man blood pretty fair.  I feel awful about all this, but you know the old rule.  Kids gotta eat.  I hope it gives you some comfort to know that horse is gonna keep us alive for a couple good weeks.  You too.  Try to move your leg."
    I strained, but couldn't.
    "See that?" he said smiling with unparalleled satisfaction, "Real good work.  Okay, let me help you up and I've got a crutch for you."
    "You shot my horse," I said finally as he helped me up onto my one good leg.
    "Horse was alive, not yours.  Now it's dead, finally in