or trophy.
So far, Ryan had been lucky. From what he could see, they hadn’t looked up once. Of course, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t at any moment, but he couldn’t move. If he tried for his blaster, he’d probably make enough noise to alert them, and that’d be all she wrote. So he waited and watched them come closer, trying to figure out some kind of plan.
At the far end, one of the coldhearts looked out the window and drew back in alarm, signaling to his partner about the lack of guards, apparently. There was a brief, signaled argument, then they headed back toward the stairway leading to the first floor, their weapons—two well-maintained short-barreled machine guns—held at their waist, muzzles pointing in front of them.
They were a few steps away when the glimmerings of a plan formed in Ryan’s mind. It would require split-second timing, but if he could pull it off… He watched as they came closer…three steps…two steps…one step away…
When the coldhearts were right below him, about to take their first step onto the staircase, he let his feet swing free and dropped to the floor, barely making a sound as he landed right behind them, drawing his Sig Sauer as he landed.
There was a moment’s surprise as both whirled to see their deaths in the single, icy-cold blue eye of the tall, black-haired man less than an arm’s length away. Still, they tried to bring their blasters to bear on him before he put a bullet into their heads, knowing it was hopeless, but trying anyway.
And it was. Even before the man on the right could finish turning, a 9 mm slug had entered his eye socket, drilling straight back into his brain and out the back of his skull, splattering the wall with red-gray gore as he slumped against the wall, his feet trembling and kicking as his limbs slowly registered his death.
Ryan switched his aim to Gas Mask and triggered two shots, knowing that the plastic lens of its eyepieces could sometimes deflect a bullet enough to prevent a kill shot. One or the other had to have done the job, since his attacker froze, standing stock-still at the top of the stairs, blaster clenched in his hands. Ryan kept his weapon aimed at the bandit, just in case he was faking, but it seemed the coldheart was on the last train west, even if his body hadn’t quite registered the fact yet.
From inside the gas mask came a small sigh, as if the coldheart had exhaled his last breath, and he started to fall backward, down the stairs. Ryan was aware that something was wrong; then he noticed it, and threw himself to the side, just as the corpse’s finger spasmed on the trigger of his blaster, emptying the entire magazine into the back of the staircase. The body disappeared, thumping its way down the stairs to land with a crash at the bottom as the roar from the blaster died away.
Sig Sauer covering the staircase, Ryan opened his eye to see the slumped body of the first raider, and dust and plaster trickling down from the blaster. The scarf, now askew over the head of the corpse, gave him another idea, and he got up and went over to the body, unwrapping the sodden garment and wrapping it around his head so that the gore-soaked section was over his face. He stripped the corpse of its drab-green shirt and slipped it on, finding the sleeves a couple inches too short, but figuring no one would notice. The smell of the scarf was overpowering, but he breathed through his mouth and walked to the stairs leading to the third floor, listening for anyone coming to investigate.
Only silence greeted him. Steeling himself, Ryan bent over and staggered up the stairs, breathing loudly with each step. At the top, he crawled out onto the landing, wheezing as if severely injured while looking around at the room.
The sniper’s position was ahead and to the right, a form still bent over the longblaster, scanning outside. Another figure was in the window next to him, next to a small scope mounted on a tripod, but looking back at the staircase, a weapon pointed at the crawling form that had just appeared.
“Hey, stop right— Jeez, Carly, is that you? What happened?” The voice turned from commanding to concerned, and Ryan felt a small hand on his arm, trying to help him up. “Come on. Let’s get you over— Hey, you’re not—”
The mistake was realized too late, as Ryan had already grabbed the spotter’s arm in a steely grip while he shoved his Sig Sauer into the man’s chest and pulled the trigger twice, shattering ribs and holing vital organs. The coldheart let out a startled grunt and collapsed to the floor. Ryan kicked the blaster out of his hand and aimed at the sniper, who had heard the commotion and was drawing a small blaster of his own. Their weapons went off almost simultaneously, and Ryan felt a small puff of air against the side of his head from the bullet’s passage as his own shot hit his target in the upper chest. The shooter fell back against his blind and tried to lift his blaster again, but his second shot went wild into the darkness. Panting with the effort, he stared at the weapon in his hand as if it weighed a thousand pounds, then lifted his gaze back to Ryan.
“Bastard….” was his last, high-pitched word, then his head lolled, and the blaster slipped from his lifeless fingers. Ryan had been covering him while scanning the rest of the room, but finding no one else here, went over to the sniper’s body. Something about him had caught his attention, and Ryan removed the drab-green cap from the body’s head to find a surprise underneath.
A woman. Not even a woman, a girl, maybe in her late teens at most. Ryan didn’t feel that much of a twang of conscience. Women were just as lethal in the Deathlands as men, more so a lot of times. And there was the fact that she had been trying to kill him just a few minutes ago. No, what he was more concerned about was who was training what should have been a ragtag group of bandits to have this much skill and precision.
Something had definitely changed in Denver, and Ryan was suddenly very curious to find out what.
Chapter Five
J.B. poked at the charred remains of what had been their dinner with the blade of his knife, shaking his head. “Damn shame.”
“Got that right.” Ryan had made his way back to the rest of the group to find them all puzzling over the unusual fight.
Mildred arched an eyebrow at both of them. “You talking about the turkey or that paramilitary force we just encountered?”
“Bit of both.” Ryan exchanged a glance with J.B., who nodded. “Someone’s got a base of operations here, and is supplying people with quality weapons—” he indicated the pile of blasters and magazines he’d taken from the bodies on his way out of the sniper’s building “—and the training to use them well.”
“Too well.” J.B. was methodically sorting the pile of weapons into types, then calibers. “Wide range, from an AK-47 to a Webley revolver—wonder where that came from?—but all are well-tended, oiled and everything.” He hefted the longblaster Ryan had brought back. “Remington 700, composite stock, 10x sight, very clean. Good trading value.”
Mildred grimaced. “Whoever sent those people out here probably has a difference of opinion on that.”
“Mebbe, but we’re holding them now. Possession’s a hundred percent of the law out here, you know that.”
“Speaking of, what about the coldhearts themselves?” Krysty waved at the three corpses that had died trying to capture J.B., Mildred and Doc. “Some are in ragged uniforms, and others—like the ones you ran into—well dressed, and all with matching shirts. What about that?”
Ryan took off the shirt he’d worn back to his friends and examined the embroidered insignia on the right sleeve. Not a patch, the symbol—a lightning bolt diagonally bisecting a field that was red, with a small sword on the upper left, and blue with what looked like an unrolled scroll of paper
