Big bully Potar Baggart didn’t understand about blow-through, but he learned as the bullet lanced right into his capacious belly and introduced him to a whole new world of pain.
He groaned and bent over, but he stayed on his feet and kept the bodies he held in his massive fists up, still shielding him. To the extent they did.
Going against an entire lifetime of training and experience, Ryan let the longblaster fall to hang by its sling without immediately jacking a fresh cartridge into the chamber from its 10-round detachable box magazine. He could not remember a time when he had done that.
But there was no way even he could throw the bolt one-handed now, not without stopping, and he was severely
disinclined to so much as break stride. He couldn’t currently feel a cannie actually breathing down his neck, and he sure as glowing rad death didn’t want to.
Instead he yanked out the SIG and stuck it out ahead of him. He aimed to try to race past the wounded but still-full-of-fight man-mountain and leave him in his dust. If not, he was willing to take any shot he could get.
He could see flashes of the man’s enormous face, red-flushed and sweat-sheened in the compound firelight, grinning at him past his victims. But the big man was smarter than Ryan reckoned as well as faster. He kept weaving them before him, spoiling any shot Ryan could hope to take, in no pattern the one-eyed man could figure out in the handful of heartbeats remaining.
The big man was about to toss one or both bodies at him. Ryan planned to dive left and hopefully clear. If one of them took him down, he was dead meat. He’d try to get a shoulder down, roll and come up blasting. Or die trying.
White hair flying behind it like a cavalry pennon, a short, slight figure raced by him at inhuman-seeming speed. But instead of showing nothing but snow-white coamer hide, it was sheathed from the neck down in dark.
Jak Lauren leaped like a monkey, grabbing hold of each of Potar’s captive shields. As fast as he was, the giant had no time to react as Jak brought up his sneaker-clad feet, then sprang upward over Potar’s sloping left shoulder. As he did, Ryan saw the glimmer of one of his favored balisong knives whip open in his left hand. It darted down and was planted at a forty-five-degree angle in Potar’s swollen trapezius muscle. Using that as an anchor, Jak whipped his body around somehow to land astride of his adversary’s shoulders.
The sec boss dropped his captives to grab frantically
at the white-faced attacker on his back. Jak’s other butterfly knife whirled open in his right palm. He yanked its mate free, then he plunged both with points toward each other into the sides of Potar’s massive neck, just in front of his neck bones.
Then the lithe albino pushed them both forward, instantly severing both carotid arteries
and
both jugular veins. Black fans of blood shot up like wings to either side of the sec boss’s pain- and rage-distorted face.
His knees gave way beneath him. Plucking his knives free, Jak threw himself into a perfect backward somersault off his victim.
The flab covering the massive muscles of Potar Baggart’s chest and belly shook like a bowlful of jelly as Ryan and all his friends fired on him. It was a waste of ammo; the giant’s brain, instantly starved of oxygen, had already closed up shop for good. But none of them felt like taking anything for granted.
As Potar hit the ground like a falling skyscraper, the companions split to either side to race around him.
“Trouble!” Ryan heard Ricky call.
Having sheathed his panga to ram a new mag into his SIG, Ryan let himself risk an over-the-shoulder look. Scores of bodies wrestled in the hellish firelight. Others, many others, lay sprawled, some motionless, some not. Demonic white figures squatted over many of them, tearing at them with gore-dripping muzzles.
A dozen or more of the cannies, though, still ran in hot pursuit of the companions. They were no more than twenty yards back and closing fast on Ryan’s exhausted band.
J.B. whipped smartly around. “Black dust, don’t you
know when you’re beat?” he asked in an almost conversational tone.
He whipped the Uzi up to his waist and raked a sustained burst back and forth across the charging pack. Coamers shrieked and fell, spurting blood.
Half of them went down, their bones and internal organs ripped by his merciless slugs. The survivors, at long last, turned their naked backs to their prey and fled back the way they had come.
There was a lot more meat that way, anyway, and much of it was free for the taking.
Wearily, the companions dragged themselves in among the now unoccupied tents along the southeast side of the campground’s perimeter. As they did, Ryan realized Conn was still on his platform, and still hollering. And this time, his wails of rage were directed at them.
“Cawdor!” he heard him screech. “You cannot escape our justice! I will follow you wherever you go, to the ends of the Earth and beyond. And then I— Wait! Stop! What are you doin’? Get away from me! You can’t do this—this is my destin-
EEEEEEEEEE
!”
Panting hard, Ryan turned and looked. Conn’s sec men were all buried beneath a pyramid of coamers—the ones who hadn’t gotten smart and run away, anyway. As Ryan watched, the cannies swarmed over Conn. The former gaudy owner had been so wound up he never even took the megaphone away from his face when he abruptly found himself confronted on his own bully pulpit by a pack of rabid, dog-faced horrors.
The horn went cartwheeling away from a wildly flailing hand. But Mathus Conn didn’t need it anymore.
His screams as those inhumanly long muzzles ripped
mouthfuls out of his face and flesh could likely be heard clear to Sinkhole, Ryan reckoned.
“Your destiny, huh?” Ryan said grimly. “Truest thing you said all day.”
He turned to his friends, all of whom were drinking air in the biggest gulps they could. Mildred and Ricky were sitting on the ground. He saw no reason to do anything other than let them—for a moment.
“Anybody see any reason why we should stick around this hellhole any longer?” he asked.
A ragged, weary, but fervent chorus of “noes” answered him.
Krysty stepped up to him. She raised her face and planted a kiss on his cheek, despite the stubble, and the coating of sweat, blood, cannie spittle and dirt that covered it.
“No reason at all, lover,” she said. “Let’s leave this place before the cannies figure out there’s more fresh meat.”
After a quick backward glance, they started to jog to the west.
* * * * *
ISBN: 978-1-474-02899-8
FORBIDDEN TRESPASS
© 2015 Worldwide Library
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Victor Milan for his contribution to this work.
Published in Great Britain 2015
by Harlequin (UK) Limited
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