His eye caught the flicker of movement and he ducked, hearing the steel whisper through the cold air. The blade thudded point first into the paneling that flanked the stairs.
It wasn't a good idea to be caught halfway up and halfway down. Feather-light on his feet, Ryan ran down the last few steps into the hall and knelt, waiting for someone to make a move.
Despite their reflexes, the children weren't all that good at this kind of game. Give them a mutie gimp to mock, chase, trip and throttle, and they were experts. But put them in a silent house, against a man with a silenced blaster, and their nerves began to turn ragged.
Ryan tested what he could hear, smell and feel, using all of his hunter's senses: shuffling feet and a faint whisper from the large back room, the smell of sweat and fear, rank and heavy, from the same place.
And the feeling.
Ryan had lived through hundreds of such moments all over Deathlands, with friends and alone the feeling that the scythe hung suspended in the air above your neck, that people would begin to die within a handful of heartbeats.
That feeling was as familiar to Ryan Cawdor as breathing. But the street gang wasn't used to it. They were urban hunters and chillers, used to running down weaker prey through ruined alleys and using their superior numbers to take them out.
This was different.
Two of them already lay dead, out in the stillness of the shadow-laked hall. Their leader, Dmitri, was wounded, blood leaking from the bullet hole near his shoulder. And there was an avenging angel waiting for them, still and patient. They huddled in the cavernous corners of the big room, gripping their knives and razors, trying to hold their breath.
There was the faintest creak of a floorboard behind Ryan. Someone descended the stairs. Moonlight flickered off something like polished metal or glass.
"Ryan?" The word was softer than a sigh.
"J.B.? In main back room. Could be five or six, probably more. Kids. Figure they're all shit-scared by now. Mebbe no blasters."
The voice of the Armorer was so quiet that it scarcely disturbed the tiny motes of dust that floated in the spears of moonlight. "Then let's go get 'em. I gotta mag-gren. Blinder. Been saving it for something like this."
"Ready," Ryan whispered.
That was all he needed to say.
Zimyanin had been watching the house through a pair of borrowed field glasses. He pulled away the eyepieces with a curse. "What the!.."
A sudden dazzling flash of burning white light had erupted somewhere inside the dacha. Even at that distance it was enough to almost blind him, making him blink and rub his eyes to try to remove the tiny specks of crimson that blurred his vision.
Then came a spattering of spaced shots, some desultory cries and a single scream, which was followed by darkness and silence.
"That's it," Zimyanin crowed in triumph.
The mag-gen was only the size of a hen's egg and made of dull metal. A colored strip ran around its top to differentiate it from shraps, implodes, frags and stuns.
Ryan closed his eye, covered it with the flat of his left hand and turned his head away from the impending explosion. The effect of a mag-gren at close range was, quite literally, blinding.
J.B. lobbed the small grenade across the hallway, underhanded. It bounced once into the rear chamber, then exploded with a muffled plopping sound.
Despite all his precautions, Ryan was conscious of the burst of stunning light that the mag-gren released on impact. It filtered through his hand and through the closed eyelid, like the glow of a distant forest fire. He could hear J.B. counting in a quiet, controlled voice.
"Four and five and six and seven and eight. That's it, Ryan."
He opened his eye, stepping to one side of the doorway. The grenade had blazed through its phase of devastating white light, and was now burning with a steady red glow. J.B. moved into place on the other side of the doorway.
The gutter brats were all there. Ryan counted around a dozen, scattered about the room. All were crouched and huddled, hands pressed against streaming, blinded eyes. If you weren't ready for a mag-gren, the intensity of the light could literally burn out your retinas. Some of the kids were crying, others staggered about, waving their weapons helplessly in the empty air. Not one of them posed any sort of threat to J.B. or Ryan.
"Bullets cost," the Armorer reminded him.
"Fuck that," Ryan snapped. "No different than chilling a pack of rabid dogs."
The executions took less than a minute. Each man walked carefully around the chamber, avoiding the desperate lunges of the children with their homemade knives and boned razors. Getting behind them, one by one they put them away with a single round through the back of the head.
The leader was last to go. Hearing the single, spaced shots, and the thumping sounds as the corpses of his gang hit the floor, he retreated into a corner. Blood leaked, forgotten, from the wound to his shoulder. Eyes squeezed tight, he waved a bone-handled knife with a serrated edge toward the sound of the approaching men, trying to hold them off.
"Like a trapped polecat." J.B. leveled his blaster and squeezed the trigger once.
The 5.6 mm round hit the teenager through the temple, kicking his skull back against the wall. As the boy slid sideways, he left a smear of dark blood and brains in a gruel on the faded paint. Tiny splinters of bone gleamed white against the crimson.
"Thats it," Ryan said.
"Like fish in a barrel," J.B. agreed. There was no regret in his voice for the bloody massacre. He knew why the children had creepy-crawled into the old mansion. He and Ryan had beaten them by being much better. It wasn't a game, not when losing was terminal.
"Gren's near finished," Ryan observed, carefully reloading his pistol.
"Caught in the floor." J.B. walked across the room, stepping over one of the corpses, the soles of his combat boots peeling stickily from the blood-soaked wood. He nudged away the molten remnants of the grenade with his toe, stamping out the circle of glowing charcoal.
"Don't want the whole place going up in smoke," Ryan said, holstering the silenced blaster at his right hip.
"Not yet. Mebbe when we get out of here. After the jump. Be good way to leave it for the Reds. Handful of ashes."
"How's the gateway?" He paused. "And how did youknow there was trouble?"
"I felt it," Krysty said from halfway down the stairs.
"How's the work?"
"Getting there." She walked into the hall and looked into the back room, where the grenade had almost burned out. "Gaia! Seems like you chilled a whole kindergarten in here."
"Them or us, lover."
Zimyanin waited another thirty minutes on the chance that someone might come from the dark bulk of the mansion and tell him what was going on. But in his heart he knew what had happened. Ryan Cawdor and his terrorist gang had been far too good for the wolf pack. He felt no grief for the murderous gang of young thugs.
"They who live by the sword shall surely perish by the sword," he said to himself in English. His 1911 phrase book had a section devoted to popular proverbs and sayings.
"What are we to do, Comrade Major-Commissar? We have collected many local villagers, as you instructed."
Zimyanin tugged thoughtfully at the drooping ends of his mustache. "Time to remove the glove of velvet and use the fist of steel. We will attack in force."
Chapter Thirty-Six
"Not that long to dawn," Doc said, glancing at the sky through the crooked timbers of the roof. Old beams, fire-marked, some with the original shingles, were still nailed in place.
Nearly a half hour had passed since the explosion of the mag-gren and the butchery of the killing pack of teenagers. There'd been no sign of any further hostile activity from the dark fields, though Ryan was certain that there was a sizable force hiding out there. Probably less than a mile away.