K
RYSTY KNELT BY
the wall. She and Mildred angled their fire into the bodies and faces of Angels trying to climb in the big front window. Blood fell on her face like torrential rain.
The 5-shot cylinder of her 640 was rapidly exhausted. She looked around. Several handblasters and a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun lay inside the window where their former owners had dropped them.
She grabbed the shotgun. Another man swung a leg over the sill. The scuffed cowboy boot with the badly separated sole barely missed clipping her head. She jammed the twin barrels into his gut and squeezed a single trigger.
He screamed so loud she could hear him over the shotgun’s roar. His leg flew backward over the sill.
A hand appeared above her head, holding what Krysty thought to be some sort of military-style handblaster. The wrist was bent to aim the barrel down. Its owner was obviously meaning to fire blind, hoping to hit one of the defenders beneath the sill level.
Fortunately the shooter wasn’t having any luck bending his wrist far enough. The trigger finger clenched twice, causing the barrel to erupt in two stunning bursts of sound.
But Krysty was not the type to stun easily. She pivoted the short-barreled scattergun upward and pulled the other trigger.
Nothing. The Angel who’d dropped it had fired it once already.
Krysty was quick thinking and not easily deterred. She simply swung the weapon by its stock in a quick, savage arc. It caught the intruding arm right on the ulna. She heard the bone crack over all the echoing shots and shrieks.
The blaster fell from suddenly numb fingers. The arm was snatched back.
Krysty dropped the empty shotgun and grabbed for the handblaster.
Mildred, having fired her own 6-shot cylinder dry—Krysty had the impression her friend had deftly refilled the weapon with a speed loader at least once—was just grabbing for a fallen compact Glock. At some point in the past somebody with little artistic skill and less taste had painted the grip of the blocky black blaster in stripes of red, yellow and black. Not recently by the chipping and wear.
As Mildred’s hand closed over the gaudy grip, another blaster appeared. This was a Ruger Mini-14, gripped two-handed with the muzzle down. Bad luck had positioned it perfectly to blast Mildred’s head apart from above with a high-velocity slug.
Krysty rolled away from Mildred, trying desperately to bring up her own retrieved blaster.
She already knew she could never fire in time to save her friend.
Chapter Nine
“Mildred!”
Ricky heard Krysty cry. He crouched toward the door end of the big southwest-facing window. He had his Webley Mark VI revolver in his right hand. His left gripped the DeLisle by its fat front end. Fast as he could work the bolt action, the carbine was only a blaster of last resort at a range like this, where the smell of stale sweat and unwashed bodies was still strong enough for his flared nostrils to detect, even over the stink of burned blaster lubricant, propellant smoke and spilled blood. But he was already a seasoned enough fighter to know he was likely to have need of its useful built-in head-bashing qualities.
He was also seasoned enough to have some idea just how deep in the glowing nuke shit he and his friends were right now.
But he wasn’t dead yet. So far neither were any of his friends. He would do all he could to keep things that way. As long as he could.
Meaning, likely, until he died trying.
He spun away from the window, straightening his arm and swinging up the hefty top-break Brit wheelgun. He saw a pair of brown hands holding an inverted Mini-14 right over Mildred’s helpless head.
Without thinking he lined up the sights on the trigger hand and pulled the trigger. Even in the heat of dire emergency, he didn’t yank the shot off. His Tío Benito had trained him better than that. And his mentor J.B., Ryan and former Olympic pistol competitor Mildred herself had all made sure he didn’t forget it.
He saw the hand spill blood. Shattered, it spasmed open. Krysty lunged and grabbed the skinny black barrel, twisting the carbine deftly out of the Angel’s other hand.
“Ace shot,” called J.B., who stood with his back to the wall by the door and his Uzi in his hands. A crouched Ryan was cranking shots out the door as fast as he could trigger them. “But mind your own place!”
The Armorer pivoted into the doorway and unleashed a firestorm in the form of a shuddering burst of full-auto fire, right into the chests and guts of the Angels still trying to barge into the restaurant.
Eyes wide in sudden panic, Ricky started to wheel back to the giant oblong opening right over his own head.
And a weight like the world landed on his shoulders and smashed him to the floor.
* * *
A
S THE SLIDE
of Ryan’s SIG Sauer P226 locked back on an empty chamber, he saw a straw-haired Angel jump on Ricky’s back. The Angel had a Bowie knife held over his head in an icepick grip.
Before he could plunge it into the youth, a shot bellowed from the rear of the restaurant. The Angel’s body jerked. Blood fountained out the right side of his chest as a .357 Magnum bullet punched through him side to side. Ricky rolled over, slamming his already lolling head into the wall. He scrambled back up to a kneeling position in time to shoot another Angel trying to scramble in through the side window.
J.B. ducked back quickly as a fresh fusillade of blasterfire cracked through the door. Ryan was about to drop the spent magazine from his SIG when more men rushed forward. One fell face-first, suggesting he’d caught one of his own side’s bullets in the back. Several others kept charging, one vaulting his fallen comrade.
“J.B.!” Ryan shouted. “Get back, keep low, cover!”
It was a risky move. It meant J.B. would be shooting right over his friends’ heads. But if Ryan trusted his life—and the lives of his companions—to anybody’s marksmanship and blaster-handling skills, it was the Armorer.
Too late. Before J.B. could respond, the room filled with angry, sweat-streaming men in brown leather vests.
Opting to free a grappling hand, Ryan jammed his SIG, still slide-locked, into its holster.
He transferred the heavy knife to his right hand and then began a sweaty, frantic, close dance with Death.
* * *
J
AK FIRED HIS
Python dry at Angels swarming in the southwest window.
He put the piece away. There was no point in a reload, when he didn’t dare shoot into the melee for fear of hitting his friends.
Ricky was standing off the attackers by swinging his funny-looking longblaster like a baseball bat. The Angels also seemed to be concerned about hitting one another, or they just wanted to finish the assault face-to-face. Either way, shooting had stopped inside the roofless box of a building.
Jak grinned. He swapped his trench knife into his right hand as he plucked a leaf-shaped throwing knife from its special place in his jacket and threw it. An Angel reeled away from Ricky, clutching at his thick neck. His bare hand couldn’t do much to keep the severed carotid from spraying out a fine crimson mist in pulsing plumes, though.
Jak whipped open a butterfly knife in his left hand.
He liked things better this way, anyway.
* * *
R
YAN GRABBED THE
wrist of a hand holding a short but wicked-looking knife that was slashing for his stomach. He gave the Angel a backhand swipe across the gullet with his panga and laid his throat open almost to the neck bone. The sudden red gush of blood forced the man’s goateed head back.
Someone grabbed Ryan’s arms from behind, pinioning them. The one-eyed man whipped his head back hard. He felt a nose squash beneath his skull, felt cartilage crumple. The grip slackened.
He broke free by thrusting his arms powerfully toward the clouded-over sky. Then he spun with a brutal overhand strike of the panga. Its broad, heavy blade took the Angel where his neck met his shoulders. Bone crunched as it split collarbone, muscles and ribs to bite into the lung. The man fell to the floor, hacking up pink froth through the mask of blood from his shattered nose.
Why didn’t he knife me? flashed through Ryan’s brain. In combat he acted, letting his senses, reflexes and training—and decades of brutal experience—guide him. But his keen tactical mind was always working.
For the first time he wondered if orders might have come down for their pursuers to take them alive. That couldn’t be good.
With the senses of a feral cat, Ryan detected another lunge coming at him from behind. He back kicked and his boot heel caught a hipbone, stopping his attacker and spinning him.
He turned to find another Angel, a gangly black man with an Afro sprouting above and below a red headband like an untrimmed bush, swinging a collapsible steel whip at his head. He blocked with the panga, then punched the man in his prominent Adam’s apple. He didn’t collapse the trachea, but the man went down coughing and gagging, anyway.
A tail of a motorcycle drive chain wrapped around a meaty fist slashed Ryan’s right cheek, just missing his good eye. He countered that with a thrust of the panga that smashed the Angel’s upper-right teeth and gashed open his brown-bearded cheek to the jaw hinge.
He got flash impressions of how his friends were faring. J.B., as always, was a machine. Hand-to-hand combat was not his favored fighting mode—he was a blaster man, and barring that, he preferred to let explosives and booby-trap gadgets do his fighting for him. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t good at it. He fought as he did everything: with precision, compact efficiency and a brutality born of the will to survive. It was like fighting a threshing machine.
The women were making the exclusively male attackers pay for underestimating them. Krysty was unusually strong for a woman. Mildred was built powerfully and knew how to put her broad hips and muscular thighs into blows. Ryan noticed she had acquired an ax handle from somewhere as she ducked under a clumsy knife swipe and poked her attacker hard in the bare gut with the end of it. Meanwhile, Krysty was flipping an assailant over her shoulder to smash into two others trying to attack the shorter woman like a living, flailing meat club.
Doc was on his feet, busting heads with blows of his gigantic handblaster and delivering vicious stabs with his slim sword. Dizzy or not, he had his adrenaline up. His face was dead pale in the heat of battle.
Ricky was the weak link. He’d led a relatively sheltered life, growing up in his peaceful little seaport ville of Nuestra Señora—though his uncle, the black sheep of the family, had taught him the ways of blasters and booby traps, and he had taught him well. But he’d learned much more in the time he’d spent with his companions. And he had his friend Jak, pale blood whirlwind, slashing and gashing, darting and ducking, to come to the rescue when Ricky’s vigorously swung blaster wasn’t standing off the enemy.
These Angels were coldhearts. They knew their way around a rumble. Whether they were primarily bullies of the weaker peasant type, or protectors, or, most likely, a combo of both, they hadn’t gotten to be such a big and powerful gang by looking for trouble. That wasn’t how it worked. They just made sure they ended it, hard and fast, when it happened.
Ryan knew they could hold off the horde. As the realization hit him, a straight razor slashed open his coat, shirtsleeve and the skin of his right biceps. He delivered a side-thrust kick to the razor man and sat him down hard on the concrete floor.
Enough.
“Everybody down!” Ryan bellowed, his voice rising above the din of angry voices and fearsome impacts of hard objects on flesh.
“Blast them!”
He was obeying his own order even as it left his mouth, dropping to the hard, blood-slicked floor. As he did, he drew his SIG. Taking the risk of leaving the panga on the concrete for a moment, he dropped the spent mag, transferred the blaster to his right hand and drove home a fresh one.
J.B.’s Uzi began to chatter. Its noise was stupefying inside the four brick walls, even with all the open windows and no roof and plenty of muffling bodies. Yellow light danced, silhouetting startled Angels in its muzzle-flash strobe.
His friends’ other blasters joined in, firing upward where they didn’t endanger one another. Only Angels.
That did it. The attackers clearly hadn’t expected such a savage and effective response from their prey. They probably expected that their overwhelming numbers would stun and shock them into panic, if not outright surrender.
But their would-be victims did not overwhelm easily.
“Clear out!” a voice yelled hoarsely. And the men in vests still on their feet plowed through the doorway and threw themselves out the windows.
Some of them were helping injured buddies. Ryan marked that. That sort of loyalty wasn’t common in the coldhearts they usually encountered. Where many would see that as weakness, Ryan recognized it as a source of strength for the Angels.
It was the same behavior he and his group displayed.
“Cease fire!” he yelled, as his slide locked back again. “Let them go!”
Others were hauling themselves up off the floor, dripping with blood, to crawl on hands and knees or even bellies and elbows out the door.
It wasn’t mercy that moved Ryan to let them escape. Not as such. They clearly weren’t going to fight again this day. And “no chilling for chilling’s sake” had been one of the Trader’s prime dicta.
Also, the seven companions didn’t have the energy to waste thundering on already defeated foes. Much less the bullets to waste.
“Everybody fit to fight?” he called, picking himself up. His body ached from a dozen bruises, a half dozen cuts and general abuse.
The others all piped up in the affirmative, ending with Mildred’s surprisingly chipper, “Amazingly, yes.”
“Right. Reload. Then secure the exits again.”
Having already recharged his own weapon, he grabbed the nearest body to the door and dropped it in the opening. The next attack would have to cross a rampart of their own buddies.
He noticed that the Angel casualties all had a large round badge sewn to the back of their vests. It was red, yellow and black. The word
Desolation
curved around the top and
Angels
around the bottom. In between was a buxom female angel with spread wings, a sword and a skull face. Ryan had to admit it was nicely done.