“Listen, monsters,” he said, first in English, and then Spanish. “Listen well and fast, if you want to get your home back....”
* * *
D
OWN
THE
CORRIDOR
,
twenty yards to the right, a door opened. A man walked out, swigging from an upturned bottle. It fell from his hands to shatter with a crash on the concrete floor when he saw half a dozen heavily armed strangers bearing down on him.
J.B. took a step toward the left wall to clear Jak, shouldered his shotgun and fired. The man screamed even before the fléchettes struck him in the upper chest and neck in a splash of red.
As he fell backward, other doors flew open. His fellow coldhearts jumped into the corridor with blasters blazing.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Cautiously Ricky peered around the edge of the open redoubt entrance, his shoulder pressed to the cool steel framework. The corridor was empty. As expected, he saw no bodies, but a door standing open a few yards down the concrete corridor on the left showed Tiburón and his men had quickly found their missing comrades. Not, he suspected, that it mattered much.
Tiburón was a devil, but he was cunning. He would never have become the sec boss for a man like El Guapo—much less survived in the role—without being smart. His finely honed paranoid instincts would have screamed alarm the moment he found the sentries missing.
And no matter what his brain told him might have happened—that they had snuck off for a smoke or a drink, or even to watch each other’s backs while they pissed—the sec boss’s gut would have told him instantly what had happened, in no uncertain terms.
Ricky was far from worldly despite his yearly trade trips with his father. But just from hearing the traders talk on the trail, or the travelers who came to his uncle’s shop to buy gear, or have theirs repaired or even just to shoot the breeze, he knew quite well that no sec boss believed there was any such thing as coincidence.
Tiburón knew perfectly well who had snuck into what appeared to Ricky to be a stronghold. And the fact that he hadn’t raised the alarm himself only gave Ricky a clammy, cold punch to the gut.
It could only mean the shark-faced sec boss planned to make up for his failure to chill Ryan and his friends by hand-delivering them to his commander.
Clutching his carbine to his skinny chest, Ricky ran. He doubted anyone would be left behind to spot him and bar his way; Tiburón would want every man on the hunt lest their pesky quarry give him the slip again. But he didn’t care.
All that mattered to him was saving his friends. And Yami.
If only he could pretend he had a moth’s chance in a furnace of reaching them in time....
* * *
T
HE
BARE
WALLS
GAVE
BACK
shattering waves of noise as J.B. ripped off a burst from his Uzi.
“Dark night,” the armorer said as he stepped back into the room where he and Ryan had ducked to find shelter from the horizontal bullet storm outside. “Why haven’t they punched up the alarm yet?”
There were about half a dozen men just ten yards down the hall, themselves ducking in and out of side rooms to loose off a burst or two.
As far as Ryan could tell, his companions were all fit to fight. Jak was in the office across the corridor. Krysty had shouted that she, Mildred and Doc were holed up in the next room back on that side.
At least two inert forms lay down the hall where the coldhearts were. Moaning came from one of the rooms the EUN men were ducking into and out of, suggesting Ryan’s group had tagged at least one more. The problem was, they were in a stalemate.
“Puerto Rican standoff,” J.B. said with a smile as he stood with his back to the wall inside the doorway. He dropped a spent magazine and rammed in another.
“You read my mind,” Ryan said sourly. He peered out around the jamb from the other side of the door. Seeing nobody, he aimed his SIG-Sauer P-226 down the corridor.
A moment later, a man jumped into the corridor with a triumphant shout and some kind of longblaster leveled from his waist.
Ryan double tapped him, center mass. The man fell over backward, his boot heels drumming the floor futilely as Ryan ducked back inside.
J.B. wasn’t smiling anymore. “Of course—” he began, then paused as a thunderous volley of full-auto shooting broke.
“That’s not really right,” he continued when the firing subsided, as coolly as if nothing had happened. “All they got to do is hold us here until reinforcements come up, and we’re toast.”
He frowned thoughtfully. He and Ryan had found themselves in a fairly large space, about thirty-five feet by twenty, that looked like a cross between some kind of metal shop and a lab. There were heavy worktables with steel-plate tops and legs bolted to the floors, and other smaller tables that seemed to be flat granite slabs, polished smooth beneath a coating of purplish dust. There were racks of what he knew were calipers and micrometers on the walls, and weird man-sized shapes spaced apart, hunched beneath plastic shrouds that had yellowed with age.
The distinctive boom of Doc’s .44 LeMat replica echoed from right behind. After a quick glance, J.B. ducked out and fired a blast.
“Damn,” he said without heat. “Nuke-sucker was trying to get lucky. Reckon he did, too, because he got his ass back out of the corridor before I could blast him.”
He shook his head. “Wish we had some grens. We’d shake some shit up then.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And if wishes could fly, we’d all be fucking screamwings. Anyway, let’s just hope
they
don’t have grens. Which they might, being an army and all.” He glanced around the room. “Krysty,” he called.
“Here, Ryan,” he heard after a moment. Blasterfire broke out from the EUN coldhearts, who apparently thought their targets would be stupid enough to stick their heads out when somebody called.
Ryan waited out the spatter of blasterfire. As it died off, he heard a flat bark he thought was Mildred’s handblaster. A squeal of pain answered from down the hall, followed by a thump and the sound of thrashing.
“Keep the bastards’ heads down, but don’t take chances.”
He heard the ear-shattering roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python from across the corridor. He reckoned he hadn’t told the coldhearts anything they couldn’t work out on their own.
Anyway, what were they going to do about it—shoot at them? Their only other options appeared to be to turtle up and wait for El Guapo to come see what the fuck all the noise was about, or make a screaming kamikaze frontal attack on Ryan’s group, which was fine with him, since if they charged right down the open corridor the coldhearts would make it convenient to kill them.
The back and forth blasterfire continued outside. Prowling around the room, Ryan tuned the racket out, even though the reverberating echoes and nasty supersonic harmonics were making his head hurt. But a little pain wouldn’t chill him. Fireblast, a
lot
of pain didn’t, so what was a headache?
An idea hit him as J.B. fired his scattergun with a boom around the corner.
“Running low on loaded mags for the Uzi,” the armorer reported.
“Got a full one?” Ryan asked. The little man nodded.
“Slap that bastard in. I have got a plan.”
* * *
L
OW
-
VOICED
CONSULTATIONS
flew among the scattered companions, then Krysty counted loudly to three.
A terrific clatter of blasterfire broke. Hearing the three-count, the EUN coldhearts had cut loose with everything they had, expecting to scythe down a sudden assault.
Instead, their shots went banging and singing off along the walls of the corridors, leaving bright red smears of copper jacket or gouging out cement dust.
When their blasters ran dry and the roaring dropped suddenly into almost dizzying silence, Ryan roared,
“Now!”
and began pushing for all he was worth.
He had no idea what the machine under the tarp was. He suspected it was some kind of fancy whitecoat measuring device, but he had no way of knowing. It was a head shorter than he was and a little bit wider than his shoulders, more or less square. The covering was draped over something round on top, for whatever that might say about the thing’s actual shape or nature. All Ryan cared about was that much of the body seemed to be solid metal.
The bastard had to have weighed half again what he did, even with the overstuffed pack on his back. It was on casters, but that mostly meant it could be moved, not that it was easy to get all that mass moving. Though he tightened up his gut and put his legs and hips into pushing, sharp metal corners cut into his palms, and the muscles of shoulders and back creaked from the effort.
He shoved the machine out into the corridor. He half expected to be met by a withering blaster firestorm. But instead the EUN coldhearts had ducked out of the way of the anticipated counter-barrage.
Ryan swung to the side of the bulky object away from the enemy, then he put his back into pushing. J.B. emerged from the door behind him as he passed.
A bearded head wearing a black beret popped out a door to the left. Ryan winced as an earth-splitting bang and dragon’s-breath heat went off by his left ear. J.B. had lit off the M-4000 shotgun he held by the pistol grip in his left hand.
The face disappeared. Ryan didn’t know if its owner managed to yank it back in time to avoid it getting filled up with the fléchettes J.B. had loaded or not. He didn’t much care.
Blasterfire snarled from up ahead. It was the higher-pitched, faster fire of an M-16 on full-auto, as opposed to the deeper, more deliberate noise of an AK. Ryan felt the rolling shield he shared with J.B. vibrate from multiple bullet strikes, but nothing touched them.
J.B. ripped an answering burst from the Uzi in his right hand. Neither of them were light weapons, the machine pistol and the scattergun, but the armorer had plenty of wiry strength in his deceptively light frame.
From ahead came shots, shouts, screams. Someone bolted out of a doorway and ran away down the corridor. Blinking to clear his eye of the stinging sweat that blurred its vision, Ryan wasn’t sure which of his friends’ shots brought the runner down with a despairing wail, to slide ten feet on his face along the floor.
The machine’s little wheels hit something that yielded slightly but didn’t give way. The thing tipped forward about an inch, then settled back and refused to budge.
Guessing it had served its purpose, Ryan shouted, “Moving!” so nobody’d blast him in the back, then swung around to the right, whipping out his panga.
As he suspected, the heavy machine had fetched up against a body lying across the corridor. A door opened a little ahead. Someone came out swinging up a longblaster from the hip.
Ryan sank the panga’s blade into the coldheart’s head with a backhand swing and a meaty thunk. He wrenched the big blade free as the man melted to the floor in the doorway, his longblaster falling from his hands with a clang.
“Freeze where you are, motherfuckers, or I’ll chill you all!” a voice roared from behind him.
As much because of the sudden threat as in spite of it, Ryan started to turn, reaching for his holstered SIG-Sauer with his left hand.
“Ryan!
No!
” he heard Krysty cry. Desperation rang plainly in her voice.
He froze. And yeah, it felt as if his heart had turned to ice inside him.
“Put the weps down,” the voice rasped. “Then hands up and turn around slowly.”
“Ryan,” he heard J.B. murmur.
“Do it,” Ryan said. He knew that this wasn’t the time to make a move.
Whether or not that time would ever come, he had no clue.
Bending at the knees, he laid the panga on the floor. He heard gentle, almost musical pings as J.B. laid his shotgun and autoblaster down with reverence. He treated his weapons gently when he wasn’t bashing people in the head with them.
Slowly Ryan stood and turned in place, raising his hands.
He had never seen the big man close up before, but there was no mistaking the big mutie: the rough corpse-gray skin and the unnatural jut of snout from the bald head told Ryan he was seeing Tiburón before the sec boss opened his mouthful of snaggly teeth.
“You fuckers caused us a bunch of trouble,” he said. “Glad to meet you at last, you know?”
Seven or eight of his coldhearts backed him up. They were aiming their weapons at the rest of the companions from a few feet up the corridor.
“We figured out right away what must’ve happened to the boys on watch up top,” the Army of National Unity sec boss said in the weird lisp his inhuman dentition gave him. “So we came hunting. And once we heard the shooting down here, we approached real quiet, and what do you know? You couldn’t wait to jump right out into our laps.”
“I say we chill the motherfuckers,” said a tall, rangy man with one dead eye.
“Easy, Angel,” Tiburón said. “We’ve got nothing but time.”
“But they wasted a load of our friends,” Angel protested. “Anyway, they’re trouble. Let’s chop them down and haul the stiffs to El Guapo.”
The sharklike face wasn’t very mobile, but it could muster a scowl, especially with an accompanying hunch of those huge, sloping shoulders.
“El Guapo’s gonna want to hurt somebody,” he said. “Triple-bad. First, because we didn’t ice these pukes out in the hills the way he told us to. Second, because they got clear down here into his shiny new HQ. You know how he gets.”
He narrowed his eyes, which looked like matte steel marbles, showing no more sign of life than Angel’s milk-white orb.
“I reckoned he’d be able to take his anger out on the prisoners. But if you want to have the satisfaction of chilling them, go right ahead. Then you take their place, understand?”
The dead-eyed man went pale behind his thatch of black beard. “No, man, never mind. Forget I said anything, okay?”
“Yeah,” Tiburón grunted. “Tie ’em up.”
“Good choice, my friends.”
Ryan turned his head at the sound of the new voice from behind, the way he and his friends had been heading before they ran into the enemy band.
It was another tall man, leanly muscular. Unlike most of the EUN coldhearts he had no beard.
Possibly he couldn’t grow one. His face was the most hideous mass of twisted scar tissue Ryan had ever seen on a human being.
“El Guapo,” Ryan said.
“No fucking kidding. And you’re the dirtbags who’ve been giving me such a pain in the ass, aren’t you?”
He turned a hot black glare on his sec boss. “And what are they doing in the middle of my new fucking fortress?”
Tiburón showed a literal shark’s smile. “Surrendering.”
For a moment Ryan thought—hoped—the hideous mutie sec boss had overplayed his hand with his even-more-hideous master. But then the Handsome One laughed.
“All right, cousin. Point to you. Congratulations. You get to live.”