The others nodded. Not even Mildred gave him any back chat. There was too much chance of being overheard, despite the talking and the rattle of battle to the east.
“Got a little surprise for them,” J.B. said, holding up a gray object roughly the size and shape of a golf ball.
“Ace,” Ryan said.
* * *
J
.
B
. REARED UP
in a gap in the wall, just far enough to chuck his little lumpy ball inside. The carefully measured length of safety fuse was sputtering viciously. He deliberately pitched it to land in the far front corner of the room. It wasn’t designed to chill, as such, but you couldn’t be too careful with plas ex.
The man up front who was nearer to the plas ex turned his head to look, then took a step toward it as J.B. ducked.
Even with a wall between J.B. and the minibomb, and J.B. prepared for it, the explosion of the little C-4 ball was savagely loud. He grinned. That was the whole point.
“Go!” Ryan shouted.
Chapter Twenty
Ryan sprang through the gap, his panga in hand. Jak was already inside. That was a calculated risk on Ryan’s part—the little albino was not so good at
not
chilling people. But since the dust-up of a few months back that had temporarily split him off from the rest, he and Ryan had seemed tighter than ever. The one-eyed man had told his friends to chill in self-defense only. Jak would do his best to do what Ryan said, even if his definition of self-defense was broad even by the standards of his companions.
Holding his shotgun in his right hand, J.B. used his left to vault through the gap in the wall he’d been hunkered near. As he did, he saw Jak rabbit punch an Angel with the studded brass-knuckle guard of his trench knife. He was the most immediate threat, by way of the Mini-14 he held ready.
The dude on watch was...not so much. He had incautiously taken a step toward the flash bang J.B. had improvised from some of the C-4 they’d happened to have left over and a blasting cap. And it had ripped his leg right off at the hip.
Could have used a trifle less, I guess, J.B. thought in passing.
His partner’s head was turned to stare at him, which was what gave Jak a free shot at the guy’s nape. J.B. noted a stream of blood from the Angel’s right ear.
Then he was rushing the trio in the middle. They stood blinking and clearly stunned by the blast, brutal as it was and out of nowhere.
Ryan clubbed down the nearest of the three from behind with the butt of his panga. Then he kicked the man on the far side of the evident leader beneath the cast skull buckle of his belt, throwing him back hard against the wall.
The man with the long blond hair came out of his momentary stupor and threw a punch at Ryan. The Deathlands warrior blocked with his left forearm and head butted his opponent in the bridge of his nose. The blond man staggered back with blood gushing over his mouth.
The man Ryan had clipped had gone down no farther than one knee. He started up, groping for a handblaster at his hip. J.B. slashed the butt of his M4000 behind the man’s ear and he fell flat on his face.
“Boss!” an alarmed voice shouted from the doorway. “What the nuke is—! Shit, shit, shit!”
The last words came out loud but slurred. Probably from the leaf-shaped throwing knife that suddenly sprouted from his cheek and the hand he’d clapped to it. He fell back out of sight.
J.B. was still on the move. The man Ryan had kicked was struggling to his feet. His right ear was bleeding, too. It had been turned toward the flash bang.
The Armorer cracked him smartly on the side of his head with the scattergun’s buttplate. He fell back down, jaw slack, eyes rolling.
The Angel named Leto had whipped out a tapering, double-edged commando-style dagger and lunged at Ryan, who grabbed his wrist with his left hand. The Angel grabbed Ryan’s right wrist.
For a moment they wrestled that way. Then Ryan thrust his shin hard into Leto’s nuts. It was an old trick that didn’t always work.
This time it did.
J.B. knelt over the man he’d clubbed, covering the doorway and the open interior beyond with his longblaster.
“Secure your man, Jak,” he called. The man in the corner was still thrashing but getting more feeble about it. The blood that had spread out over the whole corner of the room told why. He didn’t have enough of a leg left to tourniquet, anyway.
“Way ahead,” Jak said. J.B. turned his head just far enough to see the albino sitting on his victim’s upturned butt, twisting the leather vest he’d yanked off his shoulders into a makeshift restraint, pinning his wrists at the small of his back.
Sweet trick, J.B. thought. He rolled the man he’d clubbed onto his face and started to do the same.
He heard the roar of Mildred’s handblaster from the street side of the room. Somebody yelled hoarsely through the doorway.
An armed Angel appeared in the space beyond the mostly open back part of the room. The far wall was intact, the roof mostly gone. He hesitated, twitching his blaster left and right. He might not have cared about hitting his buddies, but he sure didn’t want to blast his leader. J.B. had no such hesitation. He shot him in the chest. The shot column punched a big hole through his sternum and he fell backward, triggering a futile shot at the clear and merciless sky.
Ryan had the Angel leader facedown on the concrete floor and was hauling his colors down over his arms. The man he’d hit with the panga butt and J.B. had hit with his shotgun reared up roaring, raising a revolver to blast Ryan at contact range.
And promptly did the dance of death as Krysty gave him all five rounds from the cylinder of her little .38.
J.B. focused his attention on securing his own fallen Angel. His friends were on the job.
But the Angels hadn’t given up, which provided any confirmation needed that the long-haired blond man was a high-value target, just as Ryan had posited.
J.B. flinched as he heard the nasty crack of Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster, followed almost at once by the boom of Doc’s .44.
He glanced up. Another Angel was falling to the floor of the open space to the rear of the room. Jak was kneeling by the front wall, pointing his Python in both hands.
For a moment silence fell, punctuated by groans from the next room.
Ryan had turned his captive sideways long enough to fish his belt off the loops of his jeans, then used it to tie his hands more securely behind him.
“Might as well chill me, you bastards,” Leto said. “You won’t get anything out of me.”
“Jak, Doc, J.B.—secure the rest of the building. Krysty, Mildred, get in here and prepare to back them up. Ricky, keep watch outside and don’t get shot.”
“You never let me have any fun!”
“Shut it.”
* * *
B
LASTER SHOTS CAME
from the next room—Doc’s LeMat. Jak would have used his knives to finish off any wounded who still had too much fight left in them for their own good.
Ryan stood up cautiously. At least two of the men who’d been in this room would survive. The obvious leader, the real target, had pulled through with hardly a ding to speak of.
Looking down at him, Ryan guessed this wasn’t the first time his long nose had been broken.
“Clear!” he heard J.B. call from somewhere.
He bent over, grabbed the Angel’s nose with his right thumb and forefinger and torqued it back. The man bucked and yelped.
“Ow! Fuck.”
“Just putting it back in place,” Ryan said with a grin as he stood back up. “Don’t want to spoil your good looks.”
“I know what you were doing. Fuck.”
Like the pros they were, Krysty and Mildred had moved immediately to cover the front windows the instant they heard J.B. pronounce the ruins free of threats.
Ryan regarded his captive. Looking past the blood beard and the two splendid black eyes he was developing, the man was good looking in a rough-hewn way. His cheekbones were a touch too prominent, his chin too long. He’d never be pretty. But he definitely had the look of a man women would want and men would want to be.
His eyes were glaring green laser death at Ryan right now.
“Who are you?” he spit.
“Ryan Cawdor,” Ryan said. “You’re Leto?”
“Yeah. Get a good look at me, coldheart. Because I’m the man who’s going to chill you.”
“Might want to watch your mouth writing checks your trigger hand can’t cash,” J.B. said, strolling back through the side door with his M4000 in the crook of his arm as if returning from a pleasant day hunting.
“What do you want with me? If you think you can make some kind of deal with my father, think again.” He shook his head. “Nuke waste, he’d probably pay you to chill me.”
“Not sure what we mean to do with you, truth to tell,” Ryan said. “But you’re alive, and you look likely to stay that way at least a while.”
“Chill me now,” the young man said, laying the back of his head back down on the concrete and gazing upward. “That bastard Michaud will do worse than what you could think of.”
“Wouldn’t leap to any rash judgments there, son,” J.B. said, not unkindly. “We can think of a lot of things.”
“Who said anything about Michaud?” Ryan asked. “You’re our prisoner. Right now that’s the only sure thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“That we need to have a little talk before we go making any decisions.”
“I’ll never—”
“Ryan,” Krysty said from the front of the room, “something’s happening.”
From away to the north came a snarl of full-auto fire. It had a deeper tone than the machine gun that had been mounted on the BearCat.
Ryan and J.B. looked at each other. “We’ve heard that song before,” the one-eyed man said.
He moved to the window and looked out. The war wag still had pale orange flames dancing on the inside. A round cooked off inside even as he watched.
Beyond it he could see figures running toward him across the field. Most of them wore open vests. None of the rest showed DPD black.
“Ricky, get in here,” Ryan said. “Keep watch outside. J.B., Doc, hold the next room. Hold your fire unless you need to let somebody know this isn’t friendly territory anymore. Jak, make sure nobody sneaks up and blasts us in the back.”
He drew his SIG and turned to Leto. “And if you sing out, you’re only going to get yourself stomped and anybody who tries to help chilled.”
The captive stared skyward in furious silence.
Noticeably fewer gangers headed this way than had run off south after the routed sec men. Ryan made out Penobscot Punks and Rock City members fleeing alongside the Angels. Either the Dead Elvises had fought to the last man, or they’d found their own way out of deep rad dust.
But none of them showed any interest in sheltering in the cluster of buildings where Leto had established his command post. Some headed off at an angle toward the Angel lines to the east. The rest stayed right on the street.
Behind them rolled the V-100. Black-uniformed patrolmen and a few mounted cops kept pace. They seemed to be taking their sweet time about it, and Ryan was surprised the M240 wasn’t methodically mowing down the running Angels.
Then he saw a ball of fire blossom from the machine gun’s barrel to his right. Apparently a few diehards were hiding in the weeds to snipe at the advancing DPD forces.
It was tense as the Angels and their allies fled past. But none tried to come in. They seemed interested only in getting back home as fast as their legs could carry them. The V-100 halted cautiously on a level with the still intact DPD lines.
What good they thought that’d do them, Ryan had no clue. Wag chillers like the one whose launcher lay discarded to one side of the room could reach out and touch them to a thousand yards and more. They were well within range. Did the Angels have any more rockets here or men to fire them?
“That’s the last of them,” Ricky said.
“You know you’re screwed, don’t you?” Leto said from the floor.
“Hush, you,” Mildred admonished.
“I’m keeping my voice down,” the captive said. “I don’t want to bring the pigs in here faster. And neither do you.”
“How do you reckon?” Ryan asked.
“Michaud’s a backstabbing bastard. And mebbe a bigger sadist. Not even that taint Bone is as bad, and he’s as mean as a stickie on a jolt bender.”
“But he seemed so jovial,” Mildred said. Ryan wasn’t sure whether she was being sarcastic or not.
“Whatever reward you think you’re getting, you’re not,” Leto said.
“We’ve been paid well already,” Ryan said.
Leto laughed. “What is it people like you always say? ‘What good is jack to a chill’? Once they’re done with you, you go down hard.”
“And I suppose you’re totally disinterested,” Mildred said.
“We’ll have to watch our backs,” Ryan said. “Michaud’s a baron after all.”
“DPD’s coming,” Krysty said.
The sec men had began to advance at a walk. Ryan frowned. He hadn’t made up his mind what to do with their captive yet. He sure as nuke didn’t want their employers clouding the issue.
“Get ready to get out of here,” he directed. “We’ll take our friend with us.”
“Uh, Ryan—” Ricky said.
“Well, well,” an all-too-familiar voice called from the street. “What do we have here?”
Ryan turned to see DPD SWAT Captain Morgan looking in at them from the back of a glossy black horse.
Chapter Twenty-One
“We secured the rocket launcher that took out your armored war wag,” Ryan said, hoping to put the best face on things and encourage their immediate boss to go on about his business. Or at least elsewhere.
“Ace,” the captain said.
Morgan dismounted and headed toward the building. He didn’t walk toward the room directly. Apparently clambering in through gaps in the wall was beneath his dignity. Instead he headed to a door, or at least a place that was open all the way to the ground, behind the room that Ryan and his people held.
The captain appeared at the back of the room. He had on SWAT armor and a helmet with visor raised.
He stopped dead. His blue eyes bugged out of his head at Leto.
“You’ve got him!” he sputtered. Ryan saw flecks of saliva flying from his mouth, and the captain turned bright red. “You caught the little rad sucker!”