Yuri: Scorpion Town (Draft Pt2)

Note: This is the second part of the story. If you haven't already, you should probably go back and read the first part.
On with the show.

Yuri: Scorpion Town pt2 (Draft)
Yuri sat on the roof, looking out under the sign and wishing he’d just kept walking. His plans had been to head south, then east. After that he probably would have gone south again or something; Yuri rarely planned his travels that far ahead. It wasn’t cold, but clouds scudded across the sky and made shadows dance across the town. Spotting anything in these conditions was difficult and trying to find something as stealthy as a scorpion was going to be pretty close to impossible.
Brick’s description of the beasts wasn’t all that informative either. About man-sized, sort of a greyish blue colour and shaped (oddly enough) like a scorpion. No distinctive shapes, colourations, or sheens had been mentioned. Twice now Yuri had sighted his rifle on a promising target only to find himself aiming at shadows, and he was pretty sure it was the same shadow both times.
Yuri looked down towards the door of Mack’s Drygoods, then looked again. Sitting just outside the door, bathed in light from the sign, was a scorpion. On second glance, Brick’s description had been pretty accurate, though this scorpion was probably slightly larger than an average man. How long had the critter been there for, and how did it get there unnoticed? Yuri couldn’t answer either question, but there it was. And now it was Yuri’s problem.
He evaluated the target, and it worried him. The creature’s body had a metallic sheen to it, that wasn’t good. It meant the scorpion was probably armoured. Yuri’s weapon was chambered for .308 rounds: large, heavy, and exceedingly powerful rounds that could easily kill a man at over a mile. Yuri had loaded these rounds himself, so they were reliable bullets. But there was a problem. The rounds were unjacketed: entirely made of soft lead. They were a killing bullet, designed to hit flesh and flatten out as they moved through the body. The entry wound would be small, but the exit wound… well, they weren’t really designed to kill anything one expected to eat afterwards.
That was a problem though. The bullets weren’t really good against hard targets. If the scorpion’s armour proved too thick or too hard the bullet would simply flatten out on impact without penetrating. The scorpion certainly wouldn’t be feeling all that happy afterwards, but it wouldn’t be badly injured. Ideally Yuri would have been using full-metal jacketed rounds: a soft lead core surrounded by a hard metal cover. Such rounds were designed to punch through armour or hard surfaces. Yuri had been taught about them by his father, ’ armour-piercing bullets’ he had called them. They were difficult to make though, the only ones Yuri had ever used had been ones looted from dead guards during the trip through Scorpion Valley.
Looking back, Yuri figured he probably should have asked Brick if they had armour-piercing rounds as an advance payment. Once again, hindsight proved itself infallible. In the meantime, here he was sitting on a roof with a clear shot at a well-lit target around 50 odd feet away and which, theoretically at least, had no way retaliate if he failed to kill it cleanly. What was the worst that could happen?
Yuri aimed carefully, then fired. The crack of the rifle echoed between the buildings, the sound of the bolt being worked and the ping of the ejected casing nearly disappearing in the reverberating sound.
The scorpion was thrashing around, its claws beating against the door of the drygoods store, gouging into the wood. Its tail lay a few feet behind it, cleanly severed closely behind the body. A black viscous fluid flowed from the stump. The scorpion twisted itself around for a few more moments before collapsing, drawing its legs up beneath it. The sound of the shot had barely faded before the trapdoor to the roof flew open with a crash.
“You fired!” Brick’s face was red with sudden exertion as he flew over to Yuri’s side, smashing into the railing and nearly pitching headfirst over it in his enthusiasm. He didn’t seem like a man accustomed to doing things by half-measures. Yuri calmly fired again, putting the round squarely into the beast’s body. The ground behind the scorpion grew black from splashed blood, but there was no movement.
“It appears to be dead,” Yuri said slowly, working the bolt once more. “I probably would not want to check until morning though, there might still be nerve movement.”
Brick cupped his hands around his mouth, bellowing towards the houses. “Its’ alright! We got one outside the store! Stay inside until morning, there might be more!” His civic duty apparently done, Brick grabbed Yuri in a bone-crushing embrace and swung him around a few times. It felt like an age before Yuri was returned to his feet and he surreptitiously checked himself for a broken rib. He may not have found one, but he sure felt like he had one. Still, he had proven that these scorpions, large though they were, died remarkably easily. Perhaps this job wouldn’t be so tough after all.

The next morning dawned clear and bright, normally a enjoyable day. Yuri had his own thoughts on the day, his hangover wasn’t going to let him enjoy it all that much. Still, it was an earned hangover and that was the best kind.
There was already a crowd gathered around the corpse of the fallen scorpion. As they parted to let Yuri, the ‘Mighty Slayer of Scorpions’ as Brick had christened him last night, through he had a hard time believing his eyes. The tail was intact and still lay where it had fallen but the body was another story. It had been picked clean, bits of chitin littered the ground, only a pair of massive claws showed that the bits and pieces once belonged to a scorpion.
The ground was covered in prints, Yuri guessed they were scorpion footprints. So, they were not only remarkably large and fond of eating hapless townspeople, they were also cannibals. Yuri filed that information away for later, it might come in handy.
Brick was examining the tail. Somewhat gingerly he picked it up. When it showed no signs of somehow stinging him, he brandished it over his head for the cheering crowd.
Yuri, on the other hand, wasn’t celebrating. The number of differing print sizes hinted there were at least 15 different scorpions that wandered through here at some time. From Yuri’s experience, that probably meant there’d be at least three times that number in the area. That wasn’t good. It meant he would most likely have to take them out at the source. If ten men failed, Yuri figured he probably wouldn’t have much of a chance. But there’s always another way.
If Yuri’s experiences in Scorpion Valley held true, then communal scorpions usually laired together. Usually these lairs had one main entrance and several smaller entrances, ‘ambush holes’ the other mercenaries had called them. If these scorpions were the same, then Yuri thought he might be able to use one of these other entrances in some way. Problem was finding the hole.
Yuri remembered a trick he’d picked up while travelling with his father. They’d sought shelter in a township to let Yuri’s father recover from a snake bite. Turned out the township was an American version of what Yuri and his father had once been part of: a military outfit caught in the field by the bombs. A group of bandits had wandered into the town three days after Yuri had arrived. He remembered a group of four bandits had walked into the middle of town liked they owned the place, guns in hand. They had shouted their demands at the biggest building they could find; nothing special, just the usual demands for tribute to be paid in return for the town’s safety.
The bandits couldn’t have picked a worse settlement to extort. The town was run as a military establishment, complete with an armoury full of lovingly-maintained weaponry and full physical and marksman training for all residents. Incidentally, the building the bandits were hollering their demands at happened to be the armoury, manned by around ten townspeople armed with automatic rifles.
When the firing had died down, only one of the bandits was still alive. He had been disarmed and stood in front of the town’s mayor, affectionately known around town as ‘Colonel’. Yuri could still remember the look on the bandit’s face when he was told they were going to let him go, ‘as a messenger to the rest of the gang,’ the Colonel had said.
The bandit got a good five hundred metres before the shot rang out from the tower. The bullet was perfectly aimed, passing straight through the bandit’s midsection, shredding intestines but missing the spine and other vital organs. It was a fatal wound, but death would be a long time coming.
They gave the bandit a day’s head start before gathering a posse together. Yuri had joined them, curious to see exactly what the plan was. He’d learned a lot that day. The posse had followed the blood trail straight to the gang’s hideaway and gone in all guns blazing. It was a short, one-sided gunfight. The speed of the assault made Yuri’s head spin, he couldn’t even imagine what the effect on the bandits had been. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. The effect on the bandits had been fatal.
The only friendly casualty that day had been Yuri’s gun. He had stayed back, watching the entrance just in case someone made it out. He’d seen movement just above the cave’s entrance and fired, blasting what proved to be a hapless rat into oblivion. At that moment, someone did make it out of the cave. Yuri should have had plenty of time. All he had to do was work the bolt, aim the rifle, and pull the trigger. But he had panicked. Yuri could still hear the soft rasp of metal as he yanked the bolt too hard, pulling it clean out of the rifle. He recalled trying to put it back, hearing someone yelling at him to get down, seeing the gleam of a knife in the charging man’s hand.
The man was only a few steps away from driving the knife down Yuri’s throat when Yuri finally decided it was too late to put the bolt back in. He had swung hard with the only thing he had: the rifle. Looking back, the look on the bandit’s face was almost comical when he realised he was about to run headlong into a rifle being swung by a skinny little wasteland waif. The rifle connected with more collective force than a small meteor crashing into earth. The impact probably killed the bandit outright and definitely killed the rifle. Yuri remembered standing there, looking stupidly at the bent barrel and cracked stock of his rifle without really seeing any of it when the Colonel walked over. He had slapped Yuri hard.
“When I give an order,” the Colonel had almost whispered to him. “You damn well follow it. If you’d dropped, I could have shot this trash long before you swung. Now you don’t have a gun. If you can’t respect your weapon, how can you expect anyone to respect you?”
It was a lesson Yuri had learned well. No one at the town would trade him a rifle. Even the outside traders refused. Eventually, Yuri had managed to scavenge a rifle from the back of an old truck. It was rusty, needed repairs, had crooked sights, and misfired far more often than it fired. It took four weeks for him to get the rifle into any sort of workable state. Perhaps one of the armourers could have done it far quicker, but though they were willing to help with advice and cheap parts, none would actually do it for him. By the time the rifle was ready, so was Yuri’s father. Looking back, Yuri couldn’t be entirely sure the rifle hadn’t been planted. After all, the truck he found it in wasn’t exactly off the beaten path and he’d been sent out there on the improbable errand of gathering wild herbs. Add to that the way advice on gun repair and maintenance flowed in a steady stream, but physical help was in no way forthcoming, and some form of Colonel-father conspiracy seemed likely. Yuri had learned his lesson, and picked up a few tricks along the way.
It seemed pretty easy to him. In theory a wounded scorpion should run for home, leaving a trail of blood he could follow. With any luck, the scorpion would run for the nearest bolthole and Yuri would be able to at least identify an alternate entrance. After that... well, he hadn’t quite thought that far ahead. Snares or traps seemed a likely idea, maybe a scattering of mines, or even some sort of poisoned bait. It may even be necessary to systematically wipe out the colony, and that was something Yuri was not looking forward to.
Yuri spent the day moping around town, giving his hangover time to dissipate of its own accord. That night, he took up his position on the saloon roof.