Inside the cell, J.B. and Koll sprang to their feet. Hunaker and Sam were already tearing cotton wool out of their ears.
J.B. dived across the cell and out through the now empty door space. Smoke and concrete dust rose like a fog in the narrow area beyond, but his eyes took in an M-16 lying some distance away and he grabbed it and began automatically checking it as he galloped along the passage, closely pursued by Hunaker.
Hunaker, too, was now armed, with the other man's auto-rifle, another M-16. She, too, was galloping. She, too, was spidering her fingers along her piece, tugging out the mag, glancing at it, ramming it back up again.
As they neared the bottom of the steps, two men appeared at the top, in the room with the bloodstained block in it. J.B. mentally crossed his fingers, uttered a brief prayer to the only two gods he worshiped, the god of good fortune and the god of ingenuity, and squeezed off a controlled burst on the sprint.
The M-16 functioned. Devastatingly. Rounds pounded at the two sec men at the top of the stairs, punched them back out of sight, their limbs going into spasm.
"Behind me! Hit the upper steps!"
J.B. jumped ahead of the girl as he snapped out the command and sprang up the steps, keeping tight to the left-hand wall. He squeezed the trigger and used up his entire mag, firing up and over the top of the steps at the ceiling, then dropping his angle of fire as he reached the room. He sprayed death around it. He dived at the floor, and Hunaker, behind him, suddenly had three perfect targets on the top set of steps three sec men, fleeing in panic, lunging for an escape route. Her fire line caught them as they bunched in the narrow stairway, scrambling to get out. Rounds zip-stitched three broad backs, erupting kidneys, shattering lumbar vertebrae, transforming them into bloody dolls.
Apart from the two guys that J.B. had shot from below, there were two more stiffs in the room who'd caught his bullets, one on the floor, the other sprawled drunkenly across the wood block, new blood from him sluggishly pooling out and soaking into the old.
J.B.'s eyes darted around the room. He swore as he spotted an auto-rifle lying inches from the outstretched fingers of the man lying on the floor. A stubby Steyr AUG with the long barrel.
He said, "The nukeshitter had my piece!" in horrified tones.
He swiped it up and began to check it out feverishly as Hunaker threw down the M-16 she'd been holding and picked up another. She ran to the bottom of the upper steps, squeezed off a 3-round burst around the wall angle and risked a look up. No one at the top, but she could hear a babble of voices from the huge upper room and then she had to duck back as rounds flayed the stairwell above, spraying brick and concrete shards on her.
"Hell, we could've worked ourselves into a corner here, J.B."
J.B. was too busy field-stripping the AUG and muttering blackly.
"Shit, fucker only had it an hour. See that dent?" He angrily jabbed a finger at the Steyr's stock. "See that? Fucker only had it an hour!"
"Uhh... J.B."
"Yeah!" the wiry little man snarled through his teeth.
"Could be we're stuck down here, J.B."
"Grenade the bastards out!" he snapped viciously. "Fucking vandals."
"J.B., it's only a dent..."
He glared at her murderously, his eyes simmering behind his adopted steel-rimmed glasses.
Hunaker turned away from him. Sam was stuffing herself with hardware while Koll collected spare mags for an M-16 he'd picked up. He tossed a couple of HEs in her direction and said, "Hey, J.B., let's get outta here, like Hun says. You can polish yer butt later, man."
J.B. shot him a dark look but nodded.
Suddenly Sam's head jerked up. She rose from where she'd been squatting beside one of the stiffs on the floor. Her eyes widened, the whites contrasting starkly with her velvety black skin.
She said huskily, "I heard a bang."
No one made a joke, even under the present circumstances. Even when, a second later, another burst of firing clattered out from above and they had to duck to one side as lead ricocheted around the room. When Samantha the Panther said she'd heard something no one else had, it was advisable not to laugh it off.
J.B. slid a 30-round mag up into the Steyr and said, "What kind of bang?"
"Big one, and a rumble. You didn't feel it?"
Hunaker shook her head. She said uneasily, "C'mon, J.B. I don't wanna hang around down here if they got something nasty waiting up there."
There was silence. The sub gunner had ceased firing. Not even the sec men themselves could be heard. Nothing could be heard. Nothing at all.
Sam said, "And another."
"Okay, let's beat it," said J.B.
He took a grenade from Hunaker, saying, "Cover us."
Koll slid to the corner angle of the steps, poked his M-16 around and fired a long burst, and as he did so, Sam sprang to the other side of the stairway and fired, too, straight up, her body hunched, the rifle spitting lead, the sound racketing shockingly around the echo chamber of the stairwell.
J.B. and Hunaker unpinned the eggs, counted, darted forward and, almost as one, hurled the grenades upward. The two eggs sailed high and disappeared from view beyond the top step. There was a frenzied yell, a howl of terror, then light blazed down the stairwell and there was a fierce cracking double blast, followed by the sound of glass shattering, metal clanging against metal, a rumbling roar.
J.B. hurled himself up the steps as dust and smoke billowed at him, roiling around the stairwell. He hit the top and sprayed lead into the fog with the Steyr, Hunaker behind him, her own auto-rifle chattering in a wide sweep.
The room was long and wide, formerly the high-ceilinged entrance lobby to the bank. At the far end were two massive doors, each one a wood sandwich enclosed by pierced steel planking, triple thickness. The counter of the bank remained, but nothing else. Strasser's sec men had turned the place into a recreation room, with chairs, tables, closets stuffed with weapons. Now the furniture was blasted apart by the HEs. Bodies lay around, either slumped like piles of old clothes, or in contorted heaps. Long windows to the left had all blown out, the glass and the steel shuttering together.
"Holy shit!" muttered Hunaker.
She pointed at the windows. Instead of darkness, a lurid and vibrant light throbbed redly. But this was no Deathlands sky effect caused by the rich chemical mix in the atmosphere, which often transformed night into bizarre day with a glow that made the northern aurora look off color.
"That's a fire."
Then she cried out, her yell lost in a thunder of earsplitting sound. She felt herself lifted from the floor by a shock wave that slammed into her sickeningly. For a second she felt almost weightless as she flew backward through the air and then she saw, as though in a dream, the two vast doors splitting apart and bowling toward her across the room in an orange eruption. She thought they looked like cardboard doors. Then she thudded back against something hard and blacked out.
Chapter Ten
There was some idiot using a mallet inside his skull, and it was as if he was fixing fence posts. Every few seconds, whomp! There were also various sets of crazed characters having a tug-of-war with the muscles of his arms and legs, and there was a cretin who seemed to be marching around his body, or maybe swimming along his arteries, jabbing a knife into various key places, though mainly his ribs, as and when it suited him. Not to mention that some clown seemed to be eating into the small of his back.
"Apart from that," muttered Ryan, his voice like the sound of a rusty rasp, "I'm fine."
"Check," came Krysty's reply in the darkness of the speeding truck.
Ryan froze physically not a difficult operation because he was hog-tied anyhow, lying on his left side like a strained bow, his wrist and ankles tightly laced together behind him. But it was more a mental shock, a freezing of the mind. What he'd just croaked out had been involuntary. He hadn't realized he was speaking aloud. He hadn't even realized the girl was awake.