toward the line of tables, stepping onto the nearest desk and clambering over it, his hollow boot heels echoing loudly against the wood like the clip-clopping of a horse. As he did so, Grant seized his opportunity, his leg snapping out and his foot slamming into the front of the table as the gunman climbed onto its surface.
The table’s legs screeched as they dragged across the floor with the impact of Grant’s powerful kick, and the gunman found himself toppling forward, losing his balance as the table disappeared from under him. The young man snapped off a shot at Grant, a bullet blasting toward the huge ex-Mag with a resounding crack, several people screaming in its wake.
Grant felt the bullet cut the air just past his ear, missing him by a quarter of an inch, but he was already rushing forward to meet his assailant. All around the church hall, the gunman’s allies were beginning to react, turning their own weapons on the man who had attacked their leader.
“Bunch of amateurs,” Kane muttered as he and Brigid readied themselves in their hiding place in the shadows of the porch. As the gunmen targeted Grant while he was safely protected behind the tumbling form of their leader, it gave Kane and Brigid ample opportunity to mount a surprise attack from the rear.
Over by the line of tables, Grant pumped his sledgehammer fist into the lead gunman’s thorax, knocking the man back up into the air as he continued to fall, driving the breath painfully from his throat. The gunman toppled sideways, crying out in pain as he slammed against the wooden floor with bone-shaking finality.
A trained ex-Mag like Kane, Grant was working on instinct now, and his leg snapped out once more to kick the snub-nosed .38 out of the gunman’s hand before he could bring it to bear. A stray bullet powered out from the pistol’s barrel as it flew out of the gunman’s hand and across the floor, embedding itself in the side of the water pump, water spraying everywhere.
As the gunman fell, his companions began blasting shots from their own weapons at Grant, peppering the wall behind the ex-Mag with shots as he leaped out of their path and rolled behind one of the tables. From his crouching position behind the scant protection of a desk, Grant extended the outstretched toe of his booted foot, hooking the nearby chair and scooting it across the floor toward him. His long Kevlar coat hung from the back, and Grant would need that if he was to make it through the next ten seconds alive.
Grant scanned the area to either side of him, seeing the other volunteers ducking behind the furniture as bullets drilled into the wall ahead. They looked frightened.
Abruptly the gunfire stopped. A moment later, Grant heard a voice from the other side of the desk as one of the gunmen spoke. “Richie?” the man shouted. “Richie, you okay, bro?”
Richie—the gunman whom Grant had knocked to the floor—groaned, his response something less than an actual word.
The speaker continued, issuing instructions to his people. “The guy went behind there. Ain’t nowhere else for him to go. C’mon.”
The man was half right. Grant was trapped behind the desk, but he didn’t plan on going far. With a thought, he activated the hidden Commtact communication device that lay beneath his skin, subvocalizing his command. “Kane, back me up.”
Kane’s reply was a single, whispered “Copy.” That one word was carried through the pintels of the subdermal communicator and straight through Grant’s skull-casing as though the other man stood right beside him.
Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee some years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, if a wearer went completely deaf he or she would still be able to hear, after a fashion, using the Commtact.
His brief exchange with Kane concluded, Grant was moving, leaping from cover and raising the Kevlar-weave coat out before him like a shield. The gunmen began firing instantly as Grant ran toward a nearby serving table, and he snapped the coat out at them, so that the long tails of heavy material whipped across the nearest thug’s face.
The gunman howled as the heavy coat struck him, leaving a red mark like a blush across his right cheek. He blasted another shot from the .357 Colt King Cobra in his hand. The gunman was distracted by the coat and the heavy bullet flew wide, allowing Grant to reach his objective.
Grant grabbed the handle of the pot of boiling soup, lifting it from the hot plate and tossing it out before him at the lead thug. As the angry gunman took another step toward Grant, the bubbling soup splashed across his face, scalding him like raking fire across his exposed flesh. In an instant, the gunman forgot what he was doing and toppled backward, reaching for his burning face as he hollered in his pain. Grant ignored him, leaping over the desk and flipping the half-empty soup pot out before him like an extension of his arm, a bowler rolling a bowling ball.
The heavy pot clanged against the skull of the next stick-up man with a sound like the tolling of a bell. The man fell backward against the floor, his nose caved in and blood pouring down his face. Grant leaped atop his fallen foe, lashing out again with the heavy pot he held in his right hand as bullets slapped against the Kevlar shield he held in his left.
By then, Kane and Brigid had emerged from the shadows. Before the gunmen could react, they joined the fray, felling two of their number in a swift, coordinated attack. Running, Kane drove a ram’s-head fist into the lower back of the nearest gunman before the man even realized he was under attack, forcing the man’s legs to give way so that he fell to the floor in the grip of paralysis—whether temporary or permanent Kane didn’t much care at that instant.
Next to Kane, Brigid dropped low, sweeping her outstretched leg at another gunman, connecting with his knee so hard that it popped the man’s kneecap with an audible tock that sounded like the clucking of a person’s tongue. The man tumbled to the wooden floor, crying out in a mixture of pain and astonishment as he turned to face his beautiful attacker. Brigid didn’t even give the man a second to retaliate. Her flat palm lashed out and bruised his windpipe in a sharp, savage jab. The man’s eyes rolled in his head as he sank into blissful unconsciousness.
As Kane disarmed a third gunman, Grant tossed aside the soup pot and slapped out at his own opponent’s gun, knocking it aside as the bandit reeled off a burst of gunfire that echoed in the enclosed space of the church hall. Then Grant drove a massive fist into the man’s gut, knocking the wind out of him and lifting him off his feet, such was the power of that incredible blow. As the man struggled to recover, coughing and spluttering from the savage punch to his gut, Grant drove his fist downward and into the man’s head, breaking his cheekbone and knocking him across the room. The gunman staggered until he tumbled over a serving table before flopping to the floor behind it.
Grant looked up and saw that Kane had dispatched his own opponent, but the final gunman was lifting his pistol and aiming it at the back of Kane’s head.
“Get down!” Grant shouted to his partner as his left arm whipped out with the Kevlar trench coat once again.
Kane ducked and a bullet blasted overhead. At the same instant, Grant’s coat wrapped around the gunman’s outstretched arm like a rope. As the bullet zipped harmlessly across the room, Grant yanked the coat back with such swiftness that the gunman found his arm dragged backward and his feet pulled from under him. He struggled to keep up with the sudden momentum.
Grant let go of the coat and the gunman staggered onward, hauled past the ex-Mag with the movement of the dragging coat. As
