“I’m trying! I’m trying!”
“Ain’t good enough, chief.”
Patty Hunsecker emerged from the truck with machine gun in hand. “We’ve got to go out there, Sal. We’ve got to help them.”
“What you gotta do is stay here. Like you were told.”
“Screw what I was told!”
She made a motion to leave on her own, and Belamo restrained her. “MacBalls wants you safe, and that’s the way you’re gonna stay,” he said quite calmly.
“You read me, Sal?” jabbered Belamo’s communicator almost on cue.
“Got ya, boss.”
“Any luck?”
“Professor says he’s almost got it licked.”
“Almost ain’t good enough. Case you didn’t notice, we got a situation here.”
“Just stay out of sight a little longer, boss.”
“No can do, Sal. No can do at all.”
McCracken ended up back in the center of Duke of Gloucester Street, pursuit having forced him that way. He whipped his remaining pistol out just as Johnny Wareagle emerged between a pair of buildings directly in front of him, crossbow in hand. They had barely met each other’s gaze when the remaining disciples appeared, three from the west end of the street led by Abraham and two others from the east end, effectively enclosing them. “No more running, Indian.”
“Indeed, Blainey.”
A hundred and fifty yards separated them from the disciples at either end of the street. The Splats in Blaine’s pistol were effective from only fifty yards and less, giving the disciples even more of an advantage.
“Good idea to bring the crossbow, Johnny.”
“I’ll take west, Blainey.”
“East sounds fine to me.”
As he spoke the disciples began to move forward.
“We’ve got to do something!” Patty yelled at Sal Belamo as he sprinted back for the truck.
“Just what I had in my mind, lady.”
While Professor Ainsley continued working feverishly on his keyboard, Belamo grabbed an automatic chambering shotgun and rushed back for the front of the Capitol Building.
Patty blocked his path. “You stopped me from leaving, and now I’m stopping you! You go out there and you’ll get killed. We’ll all get killed! You’ve got to get that damn thing working!”
“Right,” Sal snapped as he raised the butt of his shotgun in front of Obie Seven’s chest, “I’ll just give him a smack and the reception will turn crystal clear.”
In frustration Belamo did just that and, suddenly, lights flashed everywhere inside of Obie Seven’s oblong head. Its cylindrical hand openings returned to their ready position, 7.62-mm miniguns locked and loaded. Its tread began to roll through the arches of the Capitol toward Duke of Gloucester Street.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” muttered Sal.
Johnny tightened his grip on the crossbow as the Wakinyan slid closer. It was suspended near his midsection, held in both hands so he could load it with a fresh arrow; less than two seconds after firing. But that wasn’t good enough, Blaine knew. He had to figure out a way to use the Splats to at least slow them down.
A hundred and twenty-five yards…
Blaine suddenly thought about the many buildings the disciples had to pass between on their way to the kill. The colonial structures were constructed of heavy wood and brick with lots of windows dotting their exteriors.
Lots of glass.
Fire an exploding bullet into a few and that glass might, might, shatter into deadly flying projectiles. It would buy Johnny some time for his crossbow, if nothing else. But none of that would work until the disciples were dangerously close.
He felt Johnny’s hand coming for him before the blow lashed hard against his side. Impact from the big Indian’s shove pitched him airborne off the street, behind the cover of a huge chestnut tree.
“Johnny!”
His scream reached Wareagle as his first arrow shot outward from his bow, another following in its place as the bullets punched into the big Indian and drove him backward. He saw blood leap out as Wareagle went down.
“Johnny!”
McCracken lunged out from behind the tree and threw his body over Johnny’s. He grabbed the Indian’s pistol from his belt and fired it, along with his own, at the buildings as planned. But the Splats’s limited range merely created a path of debris and destruction through which the disciples continued to converge on them. Blaine had grasped Johnny’s crossbow when they opened fire on him from Abraham’s side of Duke of Gloucester Street. A trio of hits into his Kevlar chest protector blew him backward, and he groped desperately for one of the pistols again.
So this is how it ends.
He remembered forming that thought, when his eyes locked on the most wonderful sight ever. Rolling fast down Duke of Gloucester Street, from the area of the Capitol, came Obie Seven. Massive and ominous, the last of Professor Ainsley’s droids tore forward toward the disciples, approaching from the east. They swung, and one of them fired a grenade that exploded just in front of the droid, but Obie Seven rotated his torso slightly and kept on coming.
If the sight of him had been the greatest ever, then the sound that came next rivaled it. A metallic clanging burned through Blaine’s ears as the dual miniguns blasted an incessant hail of fire toward the two disciples closest to him. Obie-Seven might have appeared to be the most advanced of the OBD series, but in essence he was the most simple. In design he was powered by a tanklike tread. His torso could spin in a full 360-degree turn on top of a four-and-a-half-foot-high square base. His oblong head contained his visual sensors, which were programmed to find — and fire — at motion.
Any motion.
Blaine saw his dual cannons fix on the first pair of disciples and literally tear them apart with targeted fire. Obie Seven never even stopped through it all, just rolled right past then-ravaged bodies as a hail of bullets from the west end of the street greeted him. When even a pair of direct grenade strikes didn’t slow him in the least, Abraham and the two other remaining disciples abandoned the battle and attempted to flee. Obie Seven traced their motions and rotated his arm extremities accordingly. The resulting paths of gunfire stitched lines of total destruction through colonial Williamsburg as Seven sought out his prey. Windows exploded. Huge segments of structures blew apart and showered into the air. A few of the smaller buildings collapsed under the onslaught. Some of the larger ones had been peppered with enough gunfire to look as if they had been through the Civil War for real this time.
Blaine had to cover his ears from the clamor when the droid moved between Johnny and him, safe in the knowledge that the medallion flopping near his chest would keep the robot from firing on them. McCracken saw one disciple literally blown to pieces by the robot’s fire and a second perish when its fire obliterated a small stand he had taken refuge behind. In all, Obie Seven’s fire raged for just over a minute. That period saw him expend sixteen hundred rounds of ammunition, which filled the air with the smell of sulphur and cordite. Smoke rose from the debris created in the paths the disciples had used trying to escape. There was nothing still standing in that grid that did not show the effects of the droid’s powerful bullets.
“Johnny,” Blaine muttered, moving his way. “Johnny…”
He reached him expecting the worst. What greeted him was the slightest of smiles from the Indian.
“It seems we have found an able partner at last, Blainey.”