Chapter Twenty-Eight
He realized it wasn't the same gang that they'd watched a few days earlier butchering the limping man in the suburban side street. But they came from the same mold: pinched faces and glowing, excited eyes; chapped lips and red tongues that kept flicking out like lizards'. The whole body language of the junior wolf pack was taut with the desire to maim and to kill.
The girl held Ryan by the arm and stared intently up into his face, screeching something and waving at him with her free hand. She gestured for him to throw back the hood.
Ryan hadn't the least doubt that the sec forces would have circulated his description throughout the ville. Any one-eyed man would be suspect, and once they had him...
The two women by the carriage had stopped their chattering to look across at him. Ryan saw in the veiled eyes the certainty that he was dead.
The whole marketplace seemed frozen. All conversations had ceased, and the small groups gathered in the dusk watched the drama of the stranger and the children in silence.
Ryan guessed that the sec men would also be beginning to show some interest in what was happening at the top of the steps.
The girl tugged at him harder, surprising Ryan with the vicious strength of her ragged-nailed fingers. He looked down at her, seeing nothing in her sluttish blank eyes, nothing but a smoldering excitement, sure that she'd picked right.
The frozen second of time was followed by thirty seconds of desperately frenetic activity.
Ryan half turned and pulled the girl closer to himself, partly shielding what he was doing from the rest of the pack. He drew the SIG-Sauer and pressed the muzzle into the girl's neck, close under the angle of the jaw. She felt the touch of cold metal and started to recoil from it.
He squeezed the trigger.
With the built-in silencer, and with the end of the barrel rammed into the teenager's throat, the explosion of the blaster was no louder than a muffled belch.
The girl's body jerked as though she'd been kicked. The 9 mm bullet tore out the back of her neck, and exited at a slight angle, hitting a metal lamp support and whistling off the cobbles. It eventually struck one of the women by the carriage in the fleshy part of her thigh.
She screamed and fell over, knocking the brake off the carriage and allowing it to roll slowly toward the top of the steps.
Ryan pushed the dying girl away from him. As she fell limply to the stones, a small part of Ryan's brain registered what fell from her open hand — a short length of narrow, stained rope, with a knot at each end.
"Murderous bitch," he breathed.
As soon as he moved away from her body, everyone saw the pistol, and all hell broke loose.
The SIG-Sauer P-226 carried fifteen rounds. Good quality 9 mm bullets were hard to obtain in the Deathlands, and Ryan normally tried to use them sparingly.
But not this time.
He fired six spaced shots, sending everyone around diving for cover. Four of them killed members of the gang of young killers, each going down with a clean head shot. One took out a stall-holder who'd popped up holding a wire-bound scattergun. The sixth round chilled a sec guard who'd been walking near the top of the steps.
The woman with the leg wound was screaming hysterically, grabbing at the skirts of her elderly friend, preventing the woman from snatching the chromed handle of the carriage, which rolled to the brink of the wide stone steps. It paused a moment at the edge.
Eight rounds remained in the heavy blaster.
Someone threw a large green cooking apple at Ryan. The aim was good, and it dealt him a glancing blow on the left arm. He looked sideways and saw the thrower staring at him, mouth open to cheer his own skill. Ryan shot him through the open mouth, the bullet striking the young man's mother, who was hiding behind him. One round, chilling two.
Seven left.
A revving engine caught his attention and he spun around to see a small open wag roaring toward him, weaving between the abandoned stalls. A sec man hung on to the passenger seat, trying to balance and aim a Kalashnikov rifle.
Ryan paused, steadying his right wrist with his left hand. He snapped off two more bullets and watched as the windshield of the wag starred into diamond splinters. The second shot plucked the uniformed sec man out of his seat and threw him onto the cobbles behind the lurching, reeling wag. Ryan didn't wait to see the vehicle finally crash.
Five rounds remained.
Though he'd cleared the area immediately around him, Ryan had hardly moved from where the girl had snared him. It was way past time to get his legs working.
The market square held at least a hundred Russians and beyond them lay the tangled web of small streets and alleys. Normally Ryan would have tried for that, but the odds were too high against him to risk being trapped and run down.
The only other alternative was down the stairs.
As he sprinted toward them, the unwounded elderly woman tried to snatch at his legs. But he clubbed her across the ear with his pistol, smashing her glasses into her eyes.
Five bullets were left in the gun. He had another couple of mags in his capacious pockets, but to stop and reload would be to go down.
The carriage began to bounce and jolt down the steps, the baby bawling at the top of its lungs. The load of turnips skittered out at every stair.
The sec patrol on the stairs had been alerted and had formed a line across the steps, rifles ready, prepared to tackle the solitary intruder. The toppling carriage appearing over the dark skyline threw them into some confusion. One or two men began to ready themselves to try to catch it, while others were obeying the bellows of the bearded sergeant for them to stand firm and ignore it.
Ryan, gun drawn, saw the confused tableau and decided instantly to charge through. He was so far committed that retreat was impossible.
Shooting on the run, he killed the noncom and took out the two men on each side of him, leaving a gap for himself — a gap that opened directly in front of the careering baby carriage.
The SIG-Sauer held only two rounds.
Panicked, one of the sec men jerked on the trigger of his rifle. Bullets sprayed everywhere. The blaster was out of control, spitting fire across the steps, chilling the woman with the leg wound.
Before the sec men realized what was happening, Ryan was on top of them. With only two bullets left it wasn't a time to get careless. He followed the carriage, the squealing of the baby rising above the rest of the bloody cacophony.
A sec man stood in front of him, rifle at his hip, braced and ready.
Shooting from above and on the run, Ryan was pleased to see the sec man tumble backward, blood flowering from a wound in his upper chest. The dropped blaster nearly tripped the fleeing man, but he managed to vault it, keeping his balance. He overtook the rocking, rolling, jolting carriage, now three-quarters of the way down the immense flight of steps.
Ryan could see thirty or forty people near the bottom, but none seemed to be in uniform and they were all making desperate efforts to save themselves. No one seemed as though he were interested in trying to stop the one-eyed man with the smoking blaster in his fist.
Then Ryan was at the bottom of the steps, seeing his avenue of escape opening to his right — the fringes of an ancient nuke site, broken buildings leaning and tumbling against one another. It was a place where nobody lived, a place where he could run, dodge and hide, eventually working his way back toward the row of workshops where his friends were waiting for him.
He heard a bumping, clattering sound behind him, and turned to see that the carriage had miraculously made it all the way to the bottom. It pitched over the last two stairs, the red-faced occupant still screaming its head off.
A stout sec man, with faster reflexes than the rest, was halfway down the steps, and he leveled his AK-47 in Ryan's direction.
The last round from the SIG-Sauer hit him below the left armpit and drilled through his chest, shattering ribs. Shards of edged bone sliced through the man's heart and lungs. As he fell, the sec guard's finger locked on the trigger, sending a final burst of lead fanning across the bottom of the steps.