His hands were empty. As risks went, it was carefully calculated. If whoever was in here was hostile and started blasting from ambush, if they did or did not have weapons wouldn’t make much difference. But whether or not they showed blasters might make a major difference as to whether anybody in here started shooting at them.
Ryan’s gamble was based on a simple judgment call. Should they go into a potential hiding place where they might find trouble, or stay outside where they knew trouble was actively hunting them?
As J.B. and Krysty stepped up to flank him, a voice called down to them from the gallery.
“Well, well, well. What have we here?”
It was a man’s voice, sarcastic but nonthreatening.
“Name’s Cawdor,” Ryan called back. “We’re outlanders just looking for a place to lie up a bit.”
A man stepped out of a darkened doorway on the upper level. He was average height, broad across the shoulders but not carrying much extra weight that Ryan could tell by his dark T-shirt and black cargo pants. His mustache and the shock of black hair hanging over his forehead made his face look pale. A handblaster rode in a flapped holster at his left hip. Ryan couldn’t make out the kind.
“Lie up, huh?” the man said. “Sounds to me like you might have something to hide out
from
.”
Ryan shrugged. “It’s easy finding trouble in a ville this size. We’re not looking for any.”
“I think they’re trying to jump our scavvy, Nikk,” a second voice said.
It belonged to a woman who emerged from the doorway behind him. She was about the same height as her partner and had short brown hair sprouting from a grimy camo headband. She wore a rust-colored halter top with overstuffed cargo shorts, and an MP5-K machine pistol rested in a right-hand cross-draw holster strapped in front of them.
“Always the cynic, Patch,” he said as she took her place at the railing alongside him.
She shrugged. “Realist.” Her manner was as cool as it was skeptical. “Somebody’s gotta be, with a dreamer like you in charge.”
He chuckled indulgently. “At least they were smart enough to come in with their hands empty,” he told her.
Then to Ryan he said, “We’ve got blasters on you.”
“I figured,” Ryan said. “So it doesn’t look as if you’ve got much to fear from us, does it?”
“Could be a trick,” the woman said.
Nikk laughed out loud. “It could always be a trick,” he said. “That’s what makes it a game.”
“Razor Eddie’s reporting from the rooftop, Nikk,” another man’s voice called out the door. The speaker didn’t appear. “Says a gang is heading this way. Well armed. Thinks they’re the Desolation Angels.”
“Oh, shit,” a man said from the blank darkness of a doorway on the ground floor, which dispelled any suspicion Ryan might have had that Nikk was bluffing about them being covered.
Not that he’d had many to begin with.
“Aren’t they outside their usual range?” Patch asked. She wasn’t just skeptical of Ryan and company, it appeared.
Nikk shrugged. “They’ve been expanding lately. Prob’ly looking to keep up with DPD.”
“Who’s DPD?” Ryan asked. “I don’t think we’ve made their acquaintance yet.”
“You should hope that you never do.”
“They bad news?” J.B. asked.
Nikk grinned. “You really must be new in the ville,” he said. “If you haven’t learned yet that, here in D-Town, there are only two kinds of news. Bad news—”
Patch laid her head against his shoulder. “And worse news,” she said.
“Quite the comedic duo,” Doc murmured.
Nikk shook his head. “Sorry. We’ve got no beef with the Angels. We’re not looking to start one, either. You’d best be moving on.”
“And if we don’t?” Ryan asked.
“Well, say what you will about the Angels,” the scavvy boss said, “which is mostly that they’re stoneheart bastards through and through, but they aren’t sadists. So I don’t reckon it makes them much, never mind whether we hand your bodies over to them still breathing or started on your way to room temperature.”
Chapter Seven
Ryan hit the bay door running. Rather than take the ramp, he hopped down to the driveway.
Immediately he heard shots from the west. He ducked. Unslinging his Steyr, he lay prone on the pavement, then crawled forward. The concrete-lined side of the cut totally covered him from enemy fire and concealed him from their view. He heard some of his companions drop from the opening behind him.
As it sloped down close to sidewalk level, he stopped and raised his head to peer over it. The grass was too tall to allow him to see anything.
Cautiously he raised his body on his left arm, as though he was doing a one-armed pushup. He still couldn’t see anything.
Getting uneasy at not being able to see an enemy who obviously had seen
him—
or who knew roughly where he was—he pulled his knee forward, got a boot sole on the concrete and came up into a bent-forward kneeling position.
At least he was able to glimpse their enemy over the tufted tops of the grass. The Desolation Angels were about fifty yards off. He saw a dozen or so, spread out into a creditable skirmish line, advancing with longblasters across their chests.
Since they got a notion of what kind of quarry they were dealing with, the Angels had begun displaying a degree of professionalism. Apparently the war for dominance—or just survival—here in the Detroit rubble was a fierce one. Fierce enough to force the players to learn something a little better than the usual bullying and mob tactics used by gangs. Or even a lot of ville sec forces.
Ryan knew there were a lot more Angels after them than the ones he could see. And they had no way to fight them off, especially not from the loading-bay cut. And he didn’t fool himself that he could deal with Nikk and his bunch—by either sweet-talking a way back into the big building, or forcing their way in.
He didn’t hold it against the scavvies that they’d turned his companions out to face the Angels’ wrath. He would have done the same thing.
He raised the Steyr and looked through the scope. It had long eye relief, meaning it was mounted farther forward than most so that there was no danger of the eyepiece kicking back and cutting into the eye socket when it fired. It didn’t make it any harder to acquire a target or aim.
He quickly lined up a face like a sunburned fist in the reticule. Allowing for the up-and-down bob the Angel’s trot imparted, he timed his shot and fired.
The man had already fallen out of sight beyond the grass when he got the rifle back down and the scope lined up.
He yelled to his friends to run.
Ryan fired again. This time the target, an older-looking man with a full beard, turned back to yell something just as Ryan’s trigger broke. The shot hit him in the left shoulder and spun him.
“Smoke bomb out!” he heard J.B. yell from right beside him. Something arced down into Ryan’s field of vision, trailing brownish-gray smoke.
“Didn’t think they’d fall for the ‘poison gas’ gag a second time,” J.B. said. “Come on, Ryan. We’ve got to go.”
Without a second thought Ryan jumped to his feet. He’d had no intention of sacrificing himself to hold the pursuers off while his friends escaped. For one thing, he doubted it would’ve worked. There were just too many of the bastards. He saw no point in risking his ass when there was no need to.
A huge cloud billowed up between him and the enemy.
“That’s our last one of those for now,” J.B. said. He ripped off a short burst from his Uzi into the smoke screen, just to make the Angels think twice about barging in blind through the smoke. Then he and Ryan sprinted down the block away from them, after their companions.
Though another large, cultivated field opened to the north, Jak had led them not toward it but along the street, back toward the jagged but looming ruins of downtown. Ryan understood his reasons—and knew the albino youth was right. Once the Angels had stopped shooting holes in the air in response to Ricky’s makeshift firefight simulator, they almost certainly had fanned out from the fallen-in building Ryan and his team had ducked through. So they probably had men heading for the field and to the building Nikk’s scavvies claimed for their own. Above all, the fugitives needed to put as much distance between them and the Angels as possible and as fast as possible.
After he’d run a couple hundred yards, Ryan stopped and turned back. Once again he dropped to one knee.
People were just starting to emerge from the yellowish cloud of smoke. The air was still, so it was still mostly intact, dissipating only slowly in the humid, heavy air. Once more he drew a quick bead on the nearest, a tall black man with the sides of his head shaved. Ryan shot him through the chest and ran after his friends as the other Angels in sight opened fire.
So far none of them had turned out to be marksmen, which was lucky. But throw enough lead in the air, a person was bound to hit something eventually. This battle could not be allowed to go on.
At least they still had some air between themselves and the baying, blasting pack. Ryan and his crew needed to find either escape or cover to stand off the Angels until nightfall.
He ran past the exposed base of a white skyscraper. It appeared to be propped up by the remnants of a building it had crashed into. The bottom floor was an open wound of structural steel and broken concrete.
Jak had already turned the group north-northeast up the next street to take them out of their pursuers’ line of fire. Ryan followed, with J.B. just ahead of him.
“Head right at the next intersection!” he called.
“Blocked!” yelled Jak, who had sprinted ahead to scout escape routes. He was ace at his job—the best, as Ryan and his friends had learned, and learned hard some weeks before, when simmering resentments between Jak and Ryan had sent the younger man heading in one direction and the rest in another. That had gone disastrously for them all.
Jak kept running the way he was going. Up ahead Ryan glimpsed what looked at first like another shantytown, but in a fairly open space between a perilously leaning skyscraper on one side and a long, low white building on the other. This one was somehow much more colorful than the sad collection of burned out and abandoned shacks they had passed before. Also it was anything but abandoned; it was occupied by a throng of people.
A few heads started to turn as someone noticed Jak running toward them, with Krysty, Doc and Mildred close behind.
“¡Nuestra, señora!”
Ricky yelped. He was just crossing the next intersection, the one with the white skyscraper toppled right across it. “Angels!”
“Bastards die hard,” J.B. said.
“Just run!” Ryan yelled.
J.B. fired a burst left as he entered the intersection without even slowing. Ryan had slung his Steyr and drawn his SIG.
Sure enough, a passel of the vest-wearing coldhearts was moving fast through the shadowed canyon of the broad east-west street. The white building lay tilted at somewhere south of forty-five degrees. It had crunched into a sinister-looking brown-and-black building across from it and had domino toppled into the building north of it.
Chunks of rubble big and small had fallen from the crazy-angled building. The Angels had to slow to pick their way over, around and through that, but no more than they had to. Ryan snapped a couple shots their way.
Once again they paused to return fire. Bullets cracked through the air around Ryan. One bounced off the pavement right ahead of him and howled away in ricochet.
J.B. paused by the corner of the tilted brown-and-black skyscraper to fire a burst at the Angels under the slanted structure. Ryan saw one go down, yelling and kicking. The others dropped to take cover among the rubble.
That turned out not to be a good idea. Apparently the fallen skyscraper wasn’t altogether stable. Or perhaps the earth had just shifted in a tremor Ryan was too preoccupied to feel. A block of masonry the size of one of the Motor City’s most famous products—a big old gas-guzzler sedan—dropped straight down and crushed a kneeling Angel. The others cut off their assault and scuttled away like frightened quail.
“That was more luck than we deserve,” J.B. commented. He fired another burst but didn’t seem to hit any of their pursuers.
Ryan raced past him. J.B. grinned as he flashed by and moved to follow.
Jak had burst in among the colorful shacks. To his surprise Ryan realized it was an active marketplace of sorts. The colors came from old scavenged signs, cracked panels of plastic and that old standby for Deathlands building and decoration both, hammered-out soda cans. The shacks themselves seemed to consist largely of nonmetallic car body panels.
The people swapping goods and gossip broke apart like a flock of pecking birds that had had an alley cat dropped in their midst. Some of them, mostly keepers of the kiosks of fresh fruits and ancient predark goods, stood their ground, shaking fists and shouting in outraged anger at the intrusion.
“We’re sorry!” Krysty and Mildred shouted as they ducked between the stands. Mildred knocked over an angled rack of brightly colored garments and sent them fluttering to the ground, which was bare earth hard packed by decades of feet.
Ryan glanced back as he and J.B. came among the stands. The group of Angels that had chased them out of Nikk’s domain had appeared behind them. As he watched, so did the ones the block’s fall had flushed.
Shouts and shots started to fly from the two groups of Angels. Fortunately, with all the kiosks and the bodies of fleeing customers, Ryan and his friends had plenty of concealment.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much cover available. The rapidly dwindling number of incidental bodies would stop bullets much more reliably than the fiberglass panels.
“What you wanna go and bring the Angels here for?” a sturdy-looking woman in an apron and a red bandanna shouted at Ryan as he darted around her table full of what looked to him to be fried rats on sticks.
“Didn’t have much choice in the matter, lady!” he yelled back.
At that moment a wrinkly stepped from between two booths up ahead, raised a giant black single-action blaster in two palsied hands and shot Doc in the head from twenty feet away.