From the corner of his eye he saw Leto evade another clumsy, roaring rush by his father. Red Wings staggered several steps, visibly fighting his own tremendous momentum before he managed to stop. He turned back.
“Stand and face me, you cowardly little shit!”
Leto stood and faced him. He held his arms out to his sides. “Here I am, Father,” he said. “Come get me.”
Ryan was busy weaving left and right, evading grabs and blows, snatching limbs and vests to help steer his attackers into each other. That was the thing about an all-on-one—or two—pile-on attack, it was hard not to get in each others’ way.
Of course, all this bobbing and turning made his head feel as if it were about to spin off his neck. But he kept his feet and his focus against the dizziness by force of his vanadium-steel will.
Ryan saw J.B. bring the butt of his 870 hard up under the jaw of a huge Angel with blond locks flowing past door-filling shoulders. The man’s eyes closed and his head snapped back. He reeled away as J.B. wheeled smartly to bury the muzzle of the scattergun in the solar plexus of another outsize sec man.
Ryan had said “no blasters.” J.B. had correctly taken that to mean don’t shoot anybody. They weren’t going to win by playing nice. Or fair.
Then hands simultaneously caught both of Ryan’s arms from different directions. A booted foot sank into his hard gut. As the air whooshed out of him and he doubled over at the impact, he saw more Angels clambering over the wall to join the assault on the outsiders.
Even as Ryan heard Red Wings bellow again, and his vision started to grow black from the edges in, he knew that this time, it wasn’t going to be enough.
Sometimes it didn’t work.
Sometimes nothing worked.
Sometimes all the tactical savvy, the cunning, the skill, the courage, the plain determination to survive...weren’t enough.
* * *
R
ICKY KEPT PEERING
doggedly over the iron sights of his DeLisle, switching aim from Angel to Angel in an attempt to keep covering whichever seemed the most immediate threat to his friends.
He got plenty of shots. By his own reckoning, which his insecurities wouldn’t allow to be anything but conservative, he could easily have dropped three of the sec men swarming J.B. and Ryan. He had heard Ryan’s order to hold fire, and he understood the reasoning; as long as the Angels weren’t shooting, it would be self-chilling, as well as sentencing his friends to death, to open fire.
But if one of the sec men looked as if he was about to put either of Ricky’s friends and idols down for good, the youth was determined to drop the hammer and take the consequences.
From behind he heard a strange sound, a furious squalling like a wildcat fighting a wolf. He looked back over his shoulder.
The Angels had tried to grab Jak the conventional way and promptly snatched back hands streaming blood from the gashes inflicted in them by the jagged glass and metal bits he had sewn into the fabric of his jacket. Now one of them had grabbed Jak by the ankles and yanked his legs right out from under him, dropping him on his back half in and half out of the door to the stairs.
Ricky got up, turning. Yelling and slashing with his knives, Jak was dragged rapidly out of Ricky’s sight onto the stairwell, where the sound of stomping ensued. More Angels crowded in the door to get at Ricky.
He actually managed to drop two of them, one with a buttplate thrust to the bridge of the nose and another with a baseball-style swing of the flat of the butt against the shaven sides of a ginger top-knotted head, before they reached him and clubbed him down with huge, hard fists.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Krysty screamed in fury and frustration as hands seized her biceps from behind. She flung her head back rapidly, trying to head bash the nose of the man who held her. Her red hair, uncoiled long again, lashed about her face and shoulders like snakes.
But two men had grabbed her from either side. Her head whipped air, so hard she felt a twinge in her neck.
The three of them had fought furiously as Angels swarmed up over the seats at them. Doc jabbed with his sword stick. Mildred swung her M16 by the muzzle brake two-handed, knocking Angels backward over the seats and sending them reeling back stunned and bleeding along the walkway to either side with the sheer power of her stocky frame—and her rage—despite the longblaster’s lightweight synthetic stock. Krysty used her MP5 like a riot baton, jabbing with the muzzle, bashing with the butt, kicking and punching with her not-inconsiderable strength and skill where she thought it’d do the most good.
But even with their backs to the wall, their foes came at them from both sides and the front. Their advantage of height and position was quickly lost as Angels dashed up the stairs on either side of them to close in.
Krysty side kicked the man who had her right arm. He turned to take the brunt on his hip and the meaty part of the thigh and hung on. She saw Doc felled by a sucker punch to the back of his head.
She twisted her body left, ignoring the pain as her right arm was cruelly yanked. She intended to put an aimed kick into the man who had her left arm. But he stepped back as she turned.
Beyond him Mildred was tackled from behind into the backs of the top rows of seats. She gasped as the chair tops hit her in the belly and doubled her over.
A blow to the temple made Krysty’s vision blur and her head reel. A woman flew over the top row of seats to grab her legs in a tackle.
It was all over but the pounding.
* * *
I
T’S ALL OVER
, Ryan thought as more smelly, sweaty bodies piled on top of him, pinning his back to the floor.
Some of the Angel newcomers circled like wolves around a campfire, looking for the chance to put the boot in. But the Angel sec men, now that both Ryan and J.B. had been dragged down, were able to keep that from happening as they wrestled to fully subdue the pair.
Ryan glanced out from under a rank, sweat-sopping armpit to see the tall, gaunt prosecutor standing by with his staff, fingering his long gray beard and looking grim. Ryan guessed he wasn’t happy not to be able to order the outlanders chilled on the spot. But the man was currently intent on watching the battle between father and son for supremacy of the Desolation Angels.
He heard a bellow of pure hate-filled rage, laced with a bright thin peal of sheer frustration.
Several of the sec men on top of him turned to look. His head was freed up enough for him to raise it and look for himself.
Fifteen feet away, near the wall between the floor and the stands, Red Wings stood with pale columnar legs braced. His son, looking like a child, in fact, had his legs clamped around the sides of the gigantic, heaving chest. His arms were wrapped around Red Wings’ neck.
The giant had his bearded chin pressed into his collarbone, preventing Leto from choking him. This could be done even to a man as immense as Red Wings, whose neck was armored in muscle and fat. If you knew the sleight of it. Fists like mallets pounded at the much smaller man.
But Leto clung on grimly.
“You nuke-withered fool!” Red Wings howled. “You’re gonna ruin it! We coulda conquered the whole damn rubble!”
His agonized cry, surprisingly high-pitched for a man with a voice like a volcano with indigestion, seemed to shake the floor beneath Ryan, and the whole arena around them.
“No, Father,” Leto said. “We couldn’t.”
And he plunged the Bowie Ryan had given him through the side of his father’s tree-trunk-thick neck. All the way in, until the brass cross-guard dug into freckled, greenish, mottled skin.
Then with a grunt of effort Leto pressed the blade down between his father’s jaw and his chest, cutting free of his throat into the open air.
A river of blood, an ocean of blood, shot down the front of Red Wings’ chest and belly to splash on the floor.
The bloodshot green eyes rolled up. The huge knees buckled, first the left, then the right. The mighty lord and master of the Desolation Angels fell forward onto his face with a vast, sodden thump.
Leto jumped clear at the last instant to stand looking down at his father’s still-heaving body.
Ryan saw tears start down his tan cheeks.
“But we can secure our place in the Rubble for years to come,” he said. “And that’s what I mean to do.”
The prosecutor was staring in sheer shocked horror at his fallen master. At Leto’s words he shook himself visibly and cracked his staff loudly three times hard on the concrete.
“The Maximum Leader is dead!” the prosecutor trumpeted. “Long live the Maximum Leader—Leto of the Angels!”
Leto shot him a scowl, but the crowd took up the chant.
Turning to the crowd, the blond young man raised both arms high. His father’s blood rolled down his right forearm from the knife clutched in his fist like retrograde red vines.
For a moment he stood and accepted the crowd’s acclaim. Then he brought his arms down, crossed them in front of his chest—taking care not to stab himself in the process—and flung them out from side to side in a fast, decisive gesture.
The chant cut off.
“I promised my father,” he declaimed, “that I will make the Desolation Angel Nation strong—a power to endure for decades. And I will. Will you help me?”
“Yes!” the Angels roared.
Leto nodded. He turned back to gaze broodingly on his father’s elephantine white body. The clamor began to diminish as the crowd grew curious about what their new lord would say or do next.
“Might as well get off us, boys,” Ryan heard J.B. say. “Seeing as there’s been a change of administration and all.”
Ryan felt the men who still lay on top of him twist as they looked to their leader for support. Leto nodded.
Ryan sighed as the weight came off. It had taken a power of effort to breathe with all that rank beef piled on his chest.
Leto came up and offered his left hand. Ryan considered the fact he still held the red-dripping blade in his right. Then he reached up his own left hand.
The two grabbed each other forearm to forearm. Despite Ryan’s greater height and weight, the young Angel boss hauled him right up to his feet.
Ryan nodded his thanks, then he jerked his head toward Red Wings.
“You did him a favor, you know.”
Leto nodded. “I know.”
A door was opened in the wall around the former rink. Angels escorted Ryan and the rest of the companions out onto the floor. Their various bruises and scrapes showed that the treatment they were getting now was considerably gentler than it had been just a few moments earlier. Ryan scowled when he saw how both Krysty’s beautiful green eyes had been blackened.
But she smiled like the sun. “I’ll be fine,” she said through puffed, bleeding lips.
“You should see the other guys,” Mildred added with sullen triumph.
“It’s true, Lord Leto,” a limping black Angel said. “They fought like Dead Elvises on jolt.”
“Everybody fit to fight?” Ryan asked his companions.
“I got my pins under me,” J.B. said.
“While I have certainly felt better,” Doc said, “I am not dead yet.”
The others all acknowledged they were holding up. Claimed to be, anyway. Ryan turned to the Angel lord.
“So where do we stand, Leto?” he asked.
Before the man could answer, the prosecutor came sweeping up, as grand as a baron and twice as important.
“Congratulations,” he cried in his most throbbing voice. “Command me, O Maximum Leader!”
Ryan couldn’t help noticing he didn’t kneel or anything. Clearly, he reckoned the new boss would need to lean hard on somebody as he got his feet under him. Ryan knew the type well. He was the sort who’d never sit a throne and was fine with that, so long as he could be the power behind it.
Leto smiled and nodded at him. “Ace,” he said. “Grab yourself a blaster and head for the front line. There’s still a war going on.”
The face of Leto’s prosecutor-turned-sycophant went just one or two shades of gray lighter than his beard. His dark eyes got wide in their deep, dark sockets.
“But, my lord! I can serve you and our Angel Nation so much better here!”
Leto looked him hard up and down.
“No, you can’t,” he said. “You turn your coat too quick.”
Ignoring the man’s sputtering objections, he turned to the sec men who stood nearby looking none too sure of themselves.
“Get him a wep and see him to the fight. If he tries to wiggle out, then cut him loose to leave Angel land in any direction he wants—forever.”
The graybeard couldn’t quite conceal the gaunt man’s smile of relief.
“Minus his balls,” Leto added. “Since he’ll have shown he’s got no use for them anymore.”
As the crestfallen former prosecutor was hustled away by maliciously grinning sec men, Ryan said to Leto, “Thought you were the boy arguing that the Angels of all people understood something other than a boot in the teeth.”
Leto laughed. “Sometimes it takes the boot to get their attention,” he said. “Just as happy to get that part out of the way.”
He looked at the knife in his hand. “Somebody get me a rag.”
He picked the least obviously befouled—or at least the driest looking—of the half dozen handkerchiefs instantly proffered him. He wiped the Bowie’s long blade clean of his father’s gore. Throwing the bloodstained rag to the floor, he tossed the knife in the air, caught it by the blade and held the hilt out to Ryan.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Keep it,” Ryan said. “I can always pick up another.”
Leto shrugged and stuck the Bowie through his belt.
“Hope you’ll still feel that way when you hear what I’ve decided. I’ve reconsidered. We still need peace—you’re right that we can’t fight the whole nuking Rubble and survive, much less win. But I see now that peace will never be possible with Michaud and Bone in charge up in that funky stone fortress of theirs.”
Ryan looked at him hard a moment. Leto’s gaze met his squarely.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Are you sure this will work?” Leto asked.
He and a group of a half dozen Angels were lying up in some trashed-out buildings a few hundred yards mostly east and a little south of Hizzoner’s HQ with Ryan and the companions, watching the looming limestone structure through windows and gaps in the roofless walls. Late-afternoon shadows threw the figures of barricades and men toward the broken masonry walls in ever-attenuating form. And one hulking vehicle.