Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels (28 page)

The yard was better lit by lanterns and even some torches, though not by a wide margin. The V-100 was parked well out of the light, though, but incautiously near the 2nd Street wire. Its angular rear end was pointed right at him. Its 360-cubic-inch Chrysler V8 engine throbbed at a low idle. J.B. suspected Bone was still nervous enough about the possibility of the Angels having at least one more wag chiller to want to avoid having it silhouetted by the considerably brighter light streaming from the actual entryway.

Now, had
he
been in possession of a wire-guided antitank rocket like the one that had fried the Commando’s baby brother, the BearCat, he would have been tempted to set up in the ruins several hundred yards west of 2nd and get himself a nice flank shot over the fields and weed patches against a target that was backlit by the illumination broadcast from the HQ doors. Anyway, he thought their plan for dealing with the hulking war wag was
much
cooler.

J.B. was dressed as what he was: a civilian tech of the sort they knew DPD hired to do things like maintain their motor pool—and their weps. So he was wearing his usual clothes, except he’d left his trademark battered fedora in the hands of his apprentice, Ricky, still lurking back behind the corner with Keiser and Mikhail. The hat made his silhouette too distinctive now, given he and his friends had been familiar figures in these parts for about two weeks.

Without it, he was just another anonymous tech grunt. No frontline DPD fighter would give him a second glance.

The Commando blaster ignored him as he strolled up on the street side of the armored wag. The man sat perched on the rim of the top blister’s hatch with his legs dangling inside, gazing off across the yard, from which the sounds of shouted conversation and other activity floated. A cigarette ember glowed in front of his partially averted face as J.B. walked up to the car’s steel flank and started climbing one-handed up the rungs welded to the hull.

“Evenin’,” he said softly as he neared the top.

He could smell the stale sweat soaked through the man’s black T-shirt. He’d smelled the smoke far off, which was one reason he disparaged those who smoked on watch, even as a man who was known to enjoy a good cheroot from time to time. Or even just an available one.

The man turned his head suddenly and, as expected, looked down. His expression showed mild annoyance, not alarm. He was inside a secure compound, surrounded by barbed wire and hard men with blasters. What did he possibly have to fear from somebody appearing out of the muggy Motor City night?

J.B. showed him by shooting him precisely between the eyes.

The blaster report was satisfactorily quiet. The
clack-clack
of the heavy slide reciprocating wouldn’t attract much attention even if the other noise failed to mask it.

The tubby Angels armorer, Donut, had made more than one noise suppressor. Quite competent jobs he’d done, too, by J.B.’s critical eye. The one he’d lent J.B. was attached to a Glock 30. The man’s body jerked. The air filled with a stench as his relaxing bowels voided. Hope none of that gets inside, J.B. thought as he grabbed the man by the T-shirt and yanked him over the wag’s side.

Below he heard the other three scurrying forward to catch the falling chill. J.B. ascended the ladder. As he reached the top he heard a stifled exclamation of disgust from one of the men who’d grabbed the sec man. It sounded like Ricky.

Be just the kid’s luck to find his hand planted on the seat of the dude’s soiled pants.

“Marco? What the nuke kind of game you think you’re playin—”

J.B. leaned into the hatch behind the blaster. The second crewman was right beneath, his face upturned to stare out the hatch.

The Glock’s muzzle-flash illuminated the greatest look of surprise J.B. had ever seen on a human face.

He slipped inside. Landing on the chill, he stepped off and took a look around. The place reeked. J.B. detected stale smoke, sweat, rancid human grease, burned propellant and lubricating oil. The methanol fuel the engine had been modified to burn made the interior smell like the worst sort of gaudy, though with less vomit. The chill’s excrement didn’t help any.

He heard a tap against the outer hull. That’d be Ricky, letting him know they’d stashed the first dead crewman in the shadows out of sight of the main yard around the built-up corner. Anybody who happened to come this way would spot him, but then again, they’d already ensured it was unlikely a sentry would until watch change, a little more than an hour away. If somebody did happen along—well, that was just the way of the world. And they’d deal with it accordingly.

They always did.

J.B. let out a low whistle. A moment later Ricky’s head appeared as a darker shape against the starry sky.

“Get down here and help me boost this guy up to our Angels pals,” J.B. instructed. “And this time, mind not to give him a boost up by the seat of his pants.”

“Right,” Ricky said.

“Oh—and where’s my hat?”

The fedora struck him in the face a touch harder than strictly necessary.

Once they got the chill clear of the compartment, J.B. took stock of the machine. He nodded. It might still smell like a stickie’s outhouse in a slaughterhouse, but the inside was spotless, and a quick check showed everything seemed to be operating well.

The two Angels clambered inside. Mikhail wrinkled his nose and adjusted his wire-rimmed specs. The dull glow of the instrument panels was enough to show Keiser’s dark face take on an ashen look.

“You two get acquainted with our shiny new ride,” J.B. said. He settled into the driver’s seat. “Ricky, get back up, poke your head out, keep a watch outside.”

“What happens if somebody talks to me?”

“Point to your throat and act like you got sudden-onset laryngitis,” J.B. said. “Damn, Mildred’s started to get me to talk like her. All medico-like.”

“But what happens if somebody gets suspicious?” Ricky asked nervously.

“Son,” J.B. said gently, “we’re inside a twenty-two-thousand-pound armored car, with an automatic blaster up top that’ll shoot through a building. We’re the biggest, baddest dog in the yard. What do you think happens?”

* * *

“
E
VERYBODY GOOD?”
R
YAN ASKED.

The outer door was shut again. Ryan had fixed the jammed lock so that it caught again. It still had a nice push bar to let them out, and they didn’t want anybody coming in at a bad time. The door wasn’t used much, obviously, but Ryan didn’t want to leave any more to chance than he had to.

Low-voiced assent came from the others. Leto stood beside him as the two group leaders ran their eyes over their contingents, just to make sure. The lanterns in here weren’t any brighter than the ones right outside, but that was the same light anybody they encountered down here would be seeing them in. So it evened out.

Ryan, Leto and Donut were still dolled up in their scavvied SWAT armor. Donut had Raven’s katana strapped over his pack as if bringing in a confiscated wep. Its rightful owner would follow him in line. She had on her Angel colors, with handcuffs closed but not locked on her wrists before her. She had an exceedingly sullen expression on her handsome, high-browed face. Ryan didn’t know if that was acting or not.

Then he corrected himself. He didn’t know how much was acting. She still wasn’t thrilled about strolling into the belly of the beast alongside five of its extremely new hired blasters.

But it was the normally sunny blond-braided female fireplug of an Angel known as Bronk who asked, “You sure you know where we’re going?”

She was playing prisoner, too, with the handcuffs closed around her massive wrists. Ryan hoped they wouldn’t fall open and give the game away.

“Yeah,” he said. “We spent a lot of time in this building. We know where Bone’s office is and where Michaud’s quarters are. Not that we ever got an invite up there. Plus we know a lot of other things about this building.”

“It’s crazier than you can imagine,” Mildred said. “Makes you wonder what those old Masons were smoking when they designed the place.”

She had on a patrol-division uniform and wore a DPD ball cap to conceal her distinctive beaded plaits. Otherwise no attempt had been made to disguise her features. She was far less strikingly distinctive than Krysty, and a stocky black sec woman was not an unusual sight in Hizzoner’s headquarters.

Krysty had her unmistakable fire-red hair piled into a foul knit cap to hide it. Her cheeks were smudged with grime, her eyes downcast, and she wore a shabby coat that looked as if it had been used to fend off wildcats and smelled as if a dog had been the last wearer. Doc had shed his long frock coat for a similarly disreputable jacket and wore a ball cap pulled low over his stringy silver-white hair, which was also distinctive in his way. The two would shuffle along with faces downturned, as was pretty standard operating procedure for captives of the DPD.

A growl came from within the black cloth hood that covered Jak’s head. He was antsy and bordering on claustrophobic about being surrounded by stone walls underground as it was. But it was necessary, as were the black gloves that concealed his albino hands, which were fake manacled, too.

Ryan, Leto and his friends had debated trying to walk in openly, with the Angels playing sec men who were triumphantly parading their captures, the renegade blasters. They had decided quickly that gave them poor odds. It attracted too much attention, which was the last thing they wanted if this already crazy plan was to have the faintest hope of coming off. So they had to go the other way and ensure that nobody they came across would make anything of Ryan’s crew.

The final Angel was also dressed as a simple sec man. He was an enormously tall, leanly powerful black man with a shaved head called Friendly. Ryan reckoned it was one of those opposite nicknames, like calling some giant dude Tiny. As far as he could tell, though, Friendly didn’t really act the
opposite
of his name, so much as he seemed entirely uncommunicative. Still, the way his eyes glared at a body out of sockets sunk deep into a scar-cheeked skull of a face did not encourage intimacy.

He did look natural in the uniform. Enough that, everybody hoped, combined with his forbidding appearance, not even his nominally fellow sec men would care to look close enough to notice how high his sleeves and pants legs rode. The Angels hadn’t exactly had a chance to tailor their salvaged clothes for this mission.

Everybody checked out, they set off down the hall. At once, Leto said, “Visor down, Donut.”

“But you got yours up, boss!”

“I don’t have a giant beard like no sec man from Bone’s crew anybody’s ever seen. Tuck that damn thing down inside your blouse while you’re at it. Anyway, I’m gonna be trotting alongside the prisoners well to the back. Nobody’s gonna see my face.”

“I got mine down, too,” said Ryan, who brought up the rear. The heft of the M4 in his hands did little to reassure him. Not because of its light weight, but because if he actually had to use it, odds were they were all well on their way to staring up at the ceiling while they cooled down to room temperature. “Tip your head back and look out beneath the damn visor.”

A low, piteous moan came from behind one of the heavy, closed doors along the corridor.

“Some poor locked-up bastard is not having a good day,” Bronk said.

“Well,” Ryan replied, “it might just be fixing to get better pretty quick. Depending on how good a day we have.”

Just as they reached the end of the corridor, a man strolled around the corner. He was dressed in a threadbare suit complete with necktie, and he was peering at a thick sheaf of papers clipped to a clipboard as if he could actually read in that light.

He noticed the procession quick enough and stopped.

“Prisoner transport,” Leto called from down the hall. He sounded a little jaunty for a SWAT man, but he wasn’t along for his acting skills. “Stand clear, please!”

That
definitely
didn’t sound like any of Bone’s elite coldheart corps Ryan had ever heard, but the clerk obediently pressed his skinny shoulders back against a sweating stone wall.

“Visors down is strictly contrary to regulations!” he announced snippily.

They ignored him. As Donut passed him, his eyes got wide behind his specs.

“What’s that under your visor? A
beard?
”

He turned and raced off the way he had come, hollering at the top of his lungs, “Help! Help! Intruders!”

Chapter Thirty

Calm as you please, the fat, bearded Donut raised his visor with his black-gauntleted left hand.

With his other he brought up his .45 and shot the running clerk through the back of his head. The man sprawled forward onto his face. He slid all the way into the far wall, leaving a smear of blood on the floor.

“Nice shot,” Mildred said.

“Thank you,” Donut replied.

She sighed. “Too bad we’re blown now.”

“We aren’t,” Ryan rapped. “Necessarily. Leto, secure the next corridor. If somebody answers his yapping, try to bluff them. If that doesn’t work, Donut can chill them. Mildred, Friendly, help me haul this chill into one of the empty cells.”

Raven shot a hot-eyed glare over her shoulder at him. Little as she liked the whole scheme, she liked her new boss jumping to the one-eyed outlander’s command even less. Like at least a couple of the others, Mildred knew, Raven had been hardline Leto loyalists back when that had tangible risks. She gathered it had been a factor in who Leto had picked to come along on this suicide mission. He only asked the men and women he trusted all the way to the bone.

But Leto smiled at the woman as he trotted to obey. He seemed to have that rarest of gifts: an ego outsize enough to boss around a bunch of outlaws like the Desolation Angels and the sense to know when to stuff that mighty ego back down and take orders from someone who knew the terrain and the job better than he did.

Bottom line was, Ryan and his crew were seasoned experts at this. Leto and his Angels weren’t. But it took a genuine man to realize that—and act on it. Mildred reckoned the mullet-headed little surfer dude could be dangerous, a real power in the Rubble.