He laughed again. He had a good strong laugh. A good strong voice, deep and assertive. Ryan could see how he got people to follow him. You couldn’t just terrorize people into doing that. At least, not the sort of hardcases with blasters and machetes who did a baron’s dirty work terrorizing the peasants into submission.
Mebbe those awful fucking scars work for him, Ryan thought, despite the companions’ predicament. Bastard’s got to be titanium-tough for a fact, to survive getting them in the first place.
“What would you like to do with the prisoners,
jefe?
” Tiburón asked. Ryan heard more than a trace of grovel in his raspy, sibilant voice, which brought home just how stone a badass El Guapo had to be.
El Guapo looked Ryan up and down as if thinking about bidding on him, Then he passed the same scrutiny over the others. Ryan couldn’t help noticing how his intense obsidian eyes lingered on Mildred’s form—and even longer on Krysty’s.
“Torture them to death publicly, of course,” he said with a shrug. “After I mebbe get to know the bitches a bit better.”
“Now?” Tiburón asked.
“Of course not, asshole. Right now I’m headed back upstairs. We passed some rooms up there that look like mebbe they’re some kind of command posts. Or at least sec stations. Mebbe work a way to get the elevators running. And also to open up the cargo doors that open out onto the valley floor, so we don’t have to hump all the weps and meds up eight flights of stairs. Plus air the place out some from all these nuke-sucking monsters that’ve been fucking and shitting everywhere for two hundred years.”
“So what would you like us to do with them now?”
The Handsome One swept his captives with that chillingly appraising stare once more. He shrugged.
“Whatever the fuck you want,” he said. “Just don’t chill them, don’t break nothing, don’t mark them up too much.”
He stalked past the captives to grab a pinch of his sec boss’s gray, leathery cheek.
“Remember, if one of them’s not healthy enough to put up a good show when I give them their public send-off to educate the masses, you’re his stand-in. Or
hers
. Which you’d probably like even less, you know?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tiburón had a fist just like a twelve-pound sledgehammer. At least that’s what it felt like to Ryan when the ugly sec boss swung it full force into his gut.
All the air came out of Ryan’s naked body, and he sagged at the knees. His legs simply couldn’t support his weight.
The hard hands clamped on his biceps held him off the floor of the lab. With his hands tied behind his back, his own deadweight wrenched cruelly at his shoulder sockets.
“You like that?” Tiburón held up his fist and kissed it, then laughed. “That’s nothing. You’re weak,
hombre
. You need to be better, you know what I’m saying? Make a braver show when El Guapo starts cutting and burning parts off you.”
Ryan raised his head, which felt like it weighed only a little more than the mountain they were inside. He glared at his tormentor with his good eye, which wasn’t so good right now by reason of being swollen half shut.
He spat a string of ropy saliva, red with the blood of a split lip and loosened teeth, straight at that shark snout. Unfortunately he couldn’t force enough air out to send it far enough. It dropped just shy of the big mutie’s combat boots.
“Pathetic,” Tiburón said. “Piss weak.”
He rocked Ryan’s head around on his neck with a backhand so hard it felt as if the vertebrae struck sparks off one another, bright yellow sparks, that shot right through Ryan’s brain, blazing trails of pain.
He feigned being weaker than he was, just hanging in the arms of the men who held him. He let his head loll, looking around the room, searching for an opening.
Not that one looked likely to open up anytime soon.
Two burly dudes likewise held J.B. by the arms while Angel, who appeared to be Tiburón’s second in command, kicked the hell out of him. Like Ryan—like all of them—the armorer had been stripped buck naked.
Jak and Doc lay trussed like game animals, wrists and ankles bound, tossed in a corner. The right side of Jak’s thin face was one huge bruise, ugly green against his paper-white skin and now going purple and yellow around the edges. He’d resisted and gotten a longblaster butt in the face for his pain.
Doc had done more than resist. He looked like a such a befuddled, harmless old man that the sec men hadn’t taken his swordstick away while they stripped him down. He’d just docilely gone along. For a while...
Now a fat sec man lay in the corner, gasping and whining with increasing feebleness, knotted around Doc’s sword blade, which had run through his belly and out his back. His buddies, disgusted at his idiocy, hadn’t bothered to tend his wounds, put him out of his misery or even pull out the sword. They just shoved him in another corner and left him to moan until he bled out.
The women had it worst. Of course. Laid out on their backs, Mildred and Krysty weren’t much scuffed yet, except for a few palm prints on their faces. Krysty had a handprint on her left boob as well, looking as if it had been painted there, pink against her pale, perfect skin. Somebody’d gotten frisky, reckoning the boss wouldn’t notice. Or that the mark would fade before El Guapo saw it.
Their hands had been stretched out beyond the heavy wooden legs of two different worktables and tied together, trapping their arms behind their heads. EUN goons squatted on the women’s ankles, pinning their bare legs to the cold concrete floor. One of them, even more grossly obese than the one Doc had run through, seemed fascinated by the helpless women, almost as if this were his first time in a minor position of power. He kept running his fingertips along Mildred’s skin despite her struggles, snarled protests and hurled spit.
Tiburón himself had yelled at the sec man to knock it off a few times, then he’d gotten more involved with beating Ryan and seemed to forget.
Now the nightmare-headed sec boss stood leering down at Ryan with fists on hips. He was broad around the middle, but it was muscle, not flab. He looked like he could lift a wag one handed.
“You’re so piteous it’s not fun pounding on you anymore, One Eye,” he said. “But I think I know something you’ll like.”
He walked slowly over to Krysty. She shied away from him. He caught a handful of her red hair with one hand.
Then he jerked it back. “What? Fuck, your hair moves?”
She glared green laser death at him. He laughed.
“You’re a mutie, too, then, aren’t you, Fire Hair? Well, give me some of that sweet red stuff. Us muties got to stick together, no?”
Along with fury Ryan read resignation in Krysty’s face. In extreme circumstances, she could summon the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother whom she worshiped and claimed communion with. It tended to leave her drained and sometimes unconscious, which was why she used it only in emergencies. But she was clearly trying to call on the power now.
And failing.
Tiburón squatted beside Krysty and grabbed her right breast. She grimaced in revulsion as he kneaded it.
“Let her go!” Ryan surged to his feet. He might not have the power of Gaia, but suddenly he had the power of being hotter than nuke-red.
But it wasn’t enough. He was on the point of busting loose of the sec men who held his arms when a third stepped in and pile drove a steel-shod longblaster butt into his kidney. He went to his knees in a heap of pain and helpless rage.
Through a red haze of agony Ryan watched the terrible teeth close on his lover’s flawless breast. Krysty’s muscles stood out from her smooth skin as she tensed in horrified anticipation.
“How about I give you just a little love bite, Red?” the sec boss asked.
Krysty went ice-cold.
“Go ahead,” she said, shaking her writhing hair from her face. “I wonder how El Guapo will respond to your disobeying his orders. After failing him so badly already.”
For a moment she thought she saw fear in those ball-bearing eyes, but then he laughed.
“I could just, you know,” he said, “cut you some. A few bandages, throw a shirt on, Handsome wouldn’t have to know.”
She felt his needle-sharp teeth glance across the sensitive flesh of her captive breast.
Gaia, why have you forsaken me? she wailed in her mind. If she ever needed the Earth Mother’s power, if ever her companions needed that help, it was now.
But she felt cut off, somehow. She didn’t know why. She had never called upon Gaia within the safety of a redoubt. Could it have anything to do with the thick concrete walls blocking her communion with Gaia? She had no idea.
All she knew was that her natural strength wasn’t enough. She could only, helplessly, let Tiburón have his way.
He licked her nipple, which immediately hardened.
He pulled back. Though it was hard to tell from his horribly misshapen face, she knew he was grinning.
“See?” he said. “You like Tiburón. Mebbe you shouldn’t judge him so fast, Fire Hair. Mebbe El Guapo let Tiburón play with you, you know, at the end. Give you some pleasure before the pain.”
He settled back on his powerful haunches with his hands on his thighs. The great muscles threatened to burst through the strong fabric of his pants.
“You’re too white,” he said. “You mark up too easily. But I know someone who won’t.”
He whipped aside and snapped at Mildred’s left breast.
The physician shrieked. For a moment, Krysty thought the sec boss had gone too far and actually bitten her breast off. But he let her go and rocked back into a triumphant posture.
“Bastards!” J.B. shouted. “Leave her alone!” He thrashed mightily, but warned by Ryan’s near break, a couple of other sec men had stepped in to help hold him down. They already knew he was stronger than he looked.
“You’re okay, Dark Meat. No harm, see? A shark knows his own teeth, slut. I know how to make mine hurt you without drawing blood, you know?”
He shook his slope-skulled head reluctantly and stood up.
“But I better not play around anymore. I have to stay professional. But my boys, they can have all the fun they want with you bitches.”
“
All
the fun?” asked the fat guy who sat on Mildred’s right ankle. He’d gone so pale when Tiburón lunged in his general direction, Krysty thought he’d shit himself. Now she was glad he hadn’t; she wasn’t fastidious, but the ventilation in the room wasn’t that great.
“I mean just fuck ’em both, Rebozo,” Tiburón said. “Just don’t leave marks. Don’t make me break your fingers again.”
“All right, Tiburón! Whatever you say. But can somebody else take her leg? I want first crack at that good stuff!”
Tiburón sighed. “All right. Miguel, you take the fat boy’s place.”
“But what about my turn?” protested the runty guy Tiburón had gestured at.
“I’ll tell you when you take your turn. If you’d like to have a chance at
getting
a turn—and mebbe to have something to take your turn with when you get it, if you catch my meaning—you do what I say. Fucking
now
.”
“Yes, Tiburón!” the man said hastily. He actually stumbled trying to walk the few yards across open floor to take the place of the fat man, who jumped eagerly to his feet, fumbling with his web belt.
The two men holding Krysty’s ankles scooted her legs wide. Angel stood over her, grinning down. She couldn’t stop staring at his white dead eye for some reason.
Mebbe if I concentrate on that, she thought, I can ignore what he’s doing to me.
He dropped his trousers. He had a rigid hard-on already. His dick was so skinny it put Krysty unpleasantly in mind of some kind of giant jungle stick insect.
“Don’t judge me, Red,” he said. “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion.”
He dropped to his knees and got into position.
Please, Gaia, she thought, at least give me the strength to break my legs free and crush him when he enters me....
His hands grabbed her thighs like claws, and he leaned down. A trail of saliva fell from his pendulous lower lip.
She drew in a deep breath. I will not scream, she commanded herself, wondering if she could obey.
As he lifted himself to plunge inside her, his head abruptly changed shape.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was as if Angel’s head was wax and had suddenly half melted. His whole face seemed to distort, grow longer at a weird angle—right to left, front to back. His live eye bulged from the socket.
And then a piece of his forehead broke free from the rest of his deforming head and flew past Krysty on a column of dark fluid and pallid clots. He fell off to her right.
She was only slightly less surprised than Angel. Then she heard the distinctive clack-clack of a longblaster bolt being expertly and rapidly thrown, and knew what had just happened. Knew who had done it. And knew that it was the steel door to the room that had sealed her off from Gaia’s loving, vengeful energy.
The door that was now open.
The power blasted through her body as if electrodes had been fastened to her wrists and ankles. She sat up with the strength of a world.
As she did, she raised the table she was bound to and lifted it over her head. The bolts that held its legs to plates in the concrete floor failed with little musical pings.
She swung it like a hardback book, over and forward and down.
The two men who pinned her ankles had been goggling without comprehension at the twitching body of their comrade. The table knocked them back away from her bare feet and squashed them to the floor like roaches.
She tore her hands free of the nylon ropes that bound them as if each were a single strand of spring-green grass. She stood up.
Then blackness filled her head. She was aware only that she fell....
* * *
R
YAN
DIDN
’
T
KNOW
how it could possibly be happening, but he heard the unmistakable sound of a big-bore bullet hitting the back of Angel’s shaggy skull and saw him go down with the limp finality of the head dead.
Off Krysty. She was saved.
Blubber-bellied Rebozo reacted faster than anyone else in the room to Angel’s sudden demise. With a squeal of sheer terror he threw himself to the left, away from Mildred, whom he’d been on the brink of raping. Even as Ryan’s mind registered the metallic clatter of an Enfield-style longblaster bolt being thrown, dust and blood flew from the fat man’s right shoulder. He rolled under a table, crying and spurting blood.
And then Krysty smashed the two guards holding her legs with her table as if it were a flyswatter.
The guards holding Ryan and J.B. let them go to grab for their blasters. It wasn’t a bright move, but they were clearly panicked.
Ryan’s hands were tied behind his back. Now he did something his captors’ constant attention, and near-constant rain of blows, hadn’t let him do: he skinned his bound wrists down his back, over his buttocks. Then, sitting on the cold concrete, he quickly slid his legs through the circle of his arms.
His hands were still tied tight at the wrists, but now they were in front of him.
Tiburón happened to be standing near him. The huge mutie seemed as taken aback by the unexpected turn of events as anyone.
Ryan swept the legs out from under the sec boss with a vicious scissors kick. Tiburón hit the ground hard, his head bouncing off the concrete floor with a crunch. Ryan rolled over and scrambled toward his pack, lying against one wall with his weapons beside it.
With a roar, Tiburón scrambled up onto all fours and hurled himself after the one-eyed man.
His roar changed to a steam-whistle squeal of pain as Ryan whipped around and buried his panga to its grip in the mutie’s muscle-ribbed stomach.
Pain paralyzed Tiburón momentarily. Grabbing the grip with both hands, Ryan twisted the big blade in the man’s belly. Ryan let go with his left hand to ward off the clumsy but desperate blows Tiburón launched at his face. Then he wrenched the panga free, spilling Tiburón’s intestines in greasy coils on the floor.
Tiburón uttered a gobbling gasp and vomited blood onto Ryan’s chest. Energized by rage and vengeance Ryan slid around the sec boss’s side, then he leaped up onto the monster’s broad back and wrapped his arm around Tiburón’s neck, squeezing with all his strength.
Ryan was aware of shouts, shrieks and shots all around. He saw Mildred, her hands somehow freed, rise up screaming and throw one soldier against a steel-topped table so hard his back broke with a snap. He saw Doc dancing, stabbing enemies with his sword; saw J.B. shoulder an M4 carbine and squeeze off loud single shots at foes who screamed and sprayed and died.
With Ryan’s arms throttling him, Tiburón struggled mightily. But massive blood loss had weakened him so quickly that he couldn’t stand up. He swatted at Ryan, weakened rapidly and died.
The sec boss toppled forward on his snout and stayed there. Ryan swung off him, then hacked through the back of the bull-shark neck with a single downward panga stroke to make sure the bastard wasn’t playing dead.
Then he looked around, dripping blade in hand.
The fight was over. Mildred knelt beside Krysty, helping her sit up. Doc steadied a still-groggy Jak on unreliable legs.
And standing in the doorway, legs braced, high-capacity handblaster fired to lockback in both hands, silenced carbine slung, was Ricky Morales. His eyes were wide.
“That there’s some ace shooting, boy,” J.B. said with overt pride. He walked up to a sec man who lay stirring feebly. When J.B. shot him, the exaggerated muzzle flash filled the room with the stink of singed hair and cooked human flesh.
Krysty went to Ricky, unselfconscious in her nudity, and hugged him. The boy turned so red Ryan half expected his head to explode. Ryan had to turn away to hide his grin.
“We, ah, I mean, ah, thanks,” Ricky stammered. “Now we better move. Like fast. Triple-fast.”
“Why’s that?” Ryan sat down on the hard, cold edge of a table, suddenly feeling weak. He’d been beat to crap and then battled a monster to the death. He needed a breather.
“I, ah, I sort of let the
chupacabras
in,” Ricky said. “That is, I told them if they followed me into the redoubt they could get their home back. And they seemed to go for it.”
“You mean those sidling horrors are heading here?” Mildred asked.
Ricky nodded
“I’m guessing they’re not going to bother trying to tell us from the EUN,” he said. “Fireblast, it’s not like we’ve given them reason to love us.”
“Probably they won’t,” Ricky agreed. “They left me alone as I came down. I don’t know how long that’ll last.”
“Uh, Ryan?” Mildred stood holding her own clothes in a bunch. “Pants?”
“Hurry up and get dressed,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here. We don’t want to get caught between angry goatsuckers and an angrier EUN. And I
don’t
wanna run through the fucking redoubt barefoot. Might be broken glass.”
Operating on the same wavelength, J.B. had already grabbed his clothes and was donning his sturdy work boots. He then searched the dead men and stood up brandishing something like a metal apple.
“Grens!” he exclaimed with a happy grin. “This’ll help.”
“Yeah.” Ryan looked around. He noticed the fat guy, whatever the hell his name was, lying with his face to a wall. He was trying to look dead, but his blubber was still jiggling. It looked like he was suppressing sobs.
“Haul him over here,” he directed. Doc, who had draped his frock coat over his bony bare shoulders like a cape, stalked to the wounded man. Despite the sec man’s bulk, he dragged him twenty feet by the collar to dump at Ryan’s feet.
“Sir,” Doc said with a bow, then hastily began to dress.
“Listen, stupe,” Ryan told the weeping man. “I’ve got no time to fuck with you. So tell me straight and fast and I promise I won’t chill you.”
“Anything!” the injured man blubbered.
“A room with colored glass walls,” Ryan said. “Six sides. Sound familiar?”
“Oh, yes,” the fat soldier said. “Two floors down, above the floor with the vats and—and nests. You must believe me,
señores!
I don’t know what else to call them.”
“All right,” Ryan said, stepping back and nodding. “We’re square.”
The gunshot actually made him jump. A handblaster was loud in this small room. Rebozo’s head jerked to the side and blood streamed out. His boot heels hammered the floor briefly. Motionless eyes bulged sightlessly at the ceiling.
“What the fuck, Mildred?” Ryan yelled.
Mildred stood with her handblaster tipped toward the ceiling, a thin trail of smoke wisping from its muzzle. “
I
didn’t promise not to chill him,” she said. “Now
we’re
square. He got a little too goddamned free with his hands. I don’t enjoy killing, but he needed it.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “Fair enough.”
He looked at Ricky, who had reloaded his handblaster and tucked it back in its flapped holster. Sharp kid, but Ryan knew that. They all did.
“Where did he say El Guapo went?” the boy asked.
“Upstairs, my lad,” Doc said. “In search of some kind of control room.”
“Listen to me, kid,” Ryan said, picking up his pack. “Listen tight. I haven’t been square with you. I’m dead square now. We’re getting out of this shithole, and we’re not taking the stairs or the cargo doors. And we aren’t going to fight our way past all the monsters on the rad-blasted island. We have a fast way that will take us to the mainland. I can’t tell you how, but I want you to come with us.”
“We all do,” Krysty said. “You’ve earned it.”
“But what about Yami?”
J.B. approached Ricky and put a hand on his shoulder. “Face it, son,” he said. “She’s chilled. And probably better off for it.”
“No.” Ricky shook his head, then he frowned. “Well, I don’t know. And I
need
to know. If she’s alive, she needs my help. I promised to give it to her.”
Ryan shook his head. “You do what you have to, boy,” he said. “We’re headed for that six-sided glass room you heard us ask the meatbag here about. Once we get there, we’ll wait ten minutes for you. Or as long as we can hold. Be there or make your own way out. Final offer.”
The kid was already gone.
* * *
W
HEN
R
ICKY
WAS
HALFWAY
back up the stairs a rumbling, grinding sound ran through the whole redoubt. It echoed up and down the winding stairwell.
He looked up and down the area, but he could see no source. It seemed to come from all around.
The
chupacabras
who had been slipping down the stairs never paused. They seemed to recognize the sound. They weren’t bothering him; they might give him a yellow-eyed glance as they ghosted past, but they either recognized him as the one who’d led them back into their home, or knew he wasn’t the threat they were bent on dealing with.
They didn’t bother much with the stairs. They seemed to prefer to leap from railing to railing, a whole landing at a time, catching themselves with claws, feet and prehensile tails before launching down again.
The vibrations died away. Shaking his head, Ricky continued his run up the endless steps. He should have been exhausted, but the heavy pack felt like nothing on his back.
Yami, he kept thinking. Yami, I’m coming.
* * *
A
T
THE
DOOR
TO
THE
STAIRS
to the next-to-last level Ryan paused to catch his breath. They hadn’t met many EUN sec men on the run down. The
chupacabras
hadn’t gotten down here yet, and the coldhearts seemed occupied elsewhere. Probably looting.
Ryan and his companions had given the slip to a few, chilling a four-man team they couldn’t dodge.
A strange vibration came up through his boot soles. A booming squeal, hinting of vast metal movements, rose up around them like water.
“What that?” Jak asked, leaping around and looking in all directions with wild ruby eyes. “Earthquake?”
“No,” J.B. said. “That’s machinery. Mega-machinery.”
“Fireblast!” Ryan said. “That baboon-faced bastard Handsome’s got the garage door open!”
“Might be an armored vehicle we could use,” Mildred said. “If we can take out the sec men.”
But J.B. was frowning and shaking his head. “No,” he said. “That’s armored doors closing and opening. The blast doors.”
“Coming from up, down, all around,” Jak agreed.
“What the fuck? Is El Guapo trying to figure out the controls? Opening doors at random?”
“Seems pretty simultaneous for that, Ryan,” the armorer said.
“I know!” Doc said. “I know the minds of the men who built this place! The evil minds!”
“Doc, you’re losing it,” Mildred said quietly.
But Krysty shook her head. “He does have intuition into how the whitecoats who time-trawled him think, Mildred,” she said. “You have to give him that.”
Her expression and tone made it clear she didn’t envy him that insight. There wasn’t much to envy about remembering the process that had made him the way he was.
“Spit it out, Doc, and don’t walk all around the barrel of the blaster.”
“Those are automatic doors. Opened by timers at night. Closed by those selfsame timers each morning. We can access entry and exit via the keypads, but the automatic timers are for another purpose.”
“You lost me there, Doc,” J.B. admitted, scratching the back of his neck.
The old man smiled. “Do you not see? The doors open to allow the monsters bred here to stalk the land at night. And then come home with the sunset!”
“Which means—” Mildred said, then stopped, her face taking on an ashen hue under its own coating of sweat.
“The monsters the EUN ran out of this place are all going to be swarming back in,” Ryan said. “And not just the nuke-sucking
chupacabras
.”
“Right,” Jak said.
Ryan glanced down the corridors. Was it his hyperactive imagination, or did he see a dark shape duck into an open doorway?
It didn’t matter. They
would
see them, if they hung around long enough.
“Go now,” he said, pushing open the door to the stairs.
* * *
F
OR
SOME
REASON
R
ICKY
saw no
chupacabras
when he finally reached the entry of the redoubt. He suspected the ones who had crept up the hillside behind him had all headed down to their lair, to judge by what the guard said before Mildred iced him.