Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels (30 page)

At least the machine gun was loud enough to drown out the screams.

Abruptly it was done. No targets remained standing, kneeling or aiming at him. The lobby’s only occupants were the dead or the dying.

All Ricky could hear was the ringing of his ears, the pounding of his pulse and the oddly musical chiming of spent casings bouncing on the brown-and-tan checkerboard floor.

Then through the grandiose hall that led to the cathedral itself strode a solitary figure. Its tall, lean form was bulked around the torso by SWAT armor. The light of many lanterns glittered on a narrow bald skull.

“I’ll be darned,” Ricky said, his voice sounding as if it came from a very distant place.

“What the nuke is going on here?” Chief Bone demanded. “Have you lost your mind? I will fry your nuts like eggs, you little shit—”

Then he stopped blustering and began screaming. He danced like a spastic puppet as bullets sleeted through him. The Kevlar armor didn’t seem to slow down the pointy slugs.

But then, Ricky shot him a great many times indeed.

And he always remembered to do it in short, measured bursts.

* * *

“
O
KAY,”
R
YAN CALLED
from the rear. “It looks as if this is where we split.”

Ryan had led them through the bizarre maze of Detroit City headquarters, to a place where the corridor opened onto yet another of the building’s myriad high-ceilinged, echoing halls. All of them were different, though there was plenty of polished hardwood, gilt and black-and-white checkerboard floors for some reason. On the whole, despite the Michaud family’s obvious efforts to restore the place to its once-upon-a-time grandeur, it all still looked like a chipped, faded and ultimately cheap elegance, like an aging gaudy slut’s painted mouth.

With evident relief Donut shoved up his visor. “Ugh,” he said. “I hate smelling my own breath and sweat. Are we sure it’s a good idea to split our forces? I mean, I always thought—”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “You’re not supposed to do it. Except when it’s what’ll work. This is when.”

“Take it easy, Porkins,” Leto said. “It’s been sheer luck nobody’s got suspicious of all of us roaming the halls in a giant herd like this. We need speed and stealth. Our total number of ten won’t mean anything if we get spotted. Plus we got two targets.”

“Porkins?” Mildred said in disbelief. “His real name is Porkins?”

“Like we discussed,” Ryan said, ignoring her. “Donut, Raven, Bronk, Jak. You’re with me. The rest go with Leto.”

Krysty walked to him with her face upturned. They kissed passionately but briefly.

“I hate that we have to go separate ways, lover,” she said.

“Yeah, but you’re my second-in-command with J.B. busy elsewhere.”

“I hate that we’re not with the group that goes for that handsy bastard Bone,” Mildred said.

“But our plan is so ace,” Krysty told her.

Mildred gave her a narrow look. “If you say so.”

“Sure you trust your woman with Leto?” asked Raven with a sneer.

“I’ve got no problem with that.”

“What’s that sound?” Donut asked, looking up.

The hard rapping repeated itself. It sounded like a giant mutie woodpecker attacking a redwood.

“Machine gun,” Ryan said. “That’s Ricky and J.B.”

He started to say more, but then a Klaxon began to sing its rising-falling siren song.

A door opened beside Donut. A little guy in sec-man black stepped out, stuck the muzzle of an MP5 between the front and back halves of the weaponsmith’s Kevlar apron, where he was too portly to fasten it fully closed, and held the trigger down.

Chapter Thirty-One

Donut’s plump, bearded cheeks jiggled. He made gobbling noises as the bullets spiked through him. The spittle flying from his mouth turned abruptly pink.

He collapsed.

The Klaxon continued to wail mindlessly. Mildred thought of the legend of the banshee.

As Donut fell, Raven uttered a scream of rage. She had already shed the unlocked handcuffs and was stepping up to reclaim her sword. Now she ripped it out of the scabbard, cocked her arm back and cut the sec man’s dark crew-cut head off his shoulders in a single backhand slice.

Mildred acted by sheer instinct. She swooped in and grabbed the suppressed handblaster from Donut’s slack fingers before he fell on it and buried it under three hundred pounds of swiftly cooling flab.

Even as she marveled at the way she’d pulled off a move she couldn’t have reproduced if she practiced for two weeks straight, she stood up. She tipped the front-heavy wep up toward the ceiling and squeezed back the slide half an inch with her left hand. The reassuring gleam of brass met her eye. She let the slide slam home.

Mildred was first and foremost a wheelgun expert, but she knew her way around an autopistol. The first thing a person did after picking one up was to check to see if a round was chambered. Though she had watched with her own eyes as the Angels armorer swapped out the partially depleted mag after he shot down the fleeing bureaucrat, it made no difference. A good shooter did that—and she herself would yell louder than Ryan or even J.B. at anyone in the group who failed to follow the practice.

That took but a second. She shifted her left hand to cover her right. Then, pushing the blaster and its long, thick suppresser out before her in an isosceles stance, she strode through the still-open door.

The room the now-headless sec man had burst through led into a small office. It looked more like the sort of thing she’d have expected to see in her own time, not the random Gothic/renaissance/Arabian Nights fantasyland so many of the HQ’s interior spaces were, allowing for the fact that the illumination came from a pair of lanterns instead of the long-dead fluorescent lights overhead.

Two more men were inside. One sat behind a desk, gaping in surprised alarm. The other was coming out of a chair, drawing a handblaster from a hip holster.

She shot that one through the head. The bullet hit his temple at an angle that should have taken it to the far rear corner of his skull.

Without waiting to see its effect she switched aim to the man behind the desk. He was getting up now. He had a double-action revolver in his hand, rising fast.

It didn’t rise quite fast enough. She shot him once through the open mouth. As his head snapped back, Mildred dropped aim and fired again for the center of mass.

As he collapsed over the desk, she turned back to the first sec man. She put another bullet in his head before he hit the floor.

Time had slowed as if some god had grabbed it by the future and the past and stretched. Now it snapped back into place. Mildred continued into the room, swinging her blaster left and right.

“Clear,” she called.

“Nice work, Mildred,” Krysty said as the woman came back into the hall. The others had gone into defensive crouches, with blasters ready, facing up and down the passage.

She nodded curtly to her friend. Inside she was a strange seethe of emotion. It wasn’t the fact of sudden death of someone she barely knew. She was used to that. It was how sudden Donut’s death had been. In her current state, keyed up by the seemingly hopeless odds of completing their mission and living, the shock had knocked her momentarily loose from her moorings.

Outside, a full-on firefight was raging.

She offered the .45 to Leto, who had come up to stand near Ryan and over Donut’s corpse. He shook his head.

“Keep it,” he said. “You’re handy with it. And he’d want it going to someone who can use it right. Poor Donut.”

To Ryan he said, “Well, we’re blown now.”

Mildred knelt over the fallen Angel. He lay on his belly with his face turned from the wall. His staring blue eyes told a pretty persuasive story, but she pressed two fingers against his neck by his ear to find the basilar artery, most accessible given his position.

“Poor Harry,” Bronk said. “He didn’t deserve that.”

“Nobody does,” Krysty said. “Except for the likes of Bone.”

“You take your people back out the way you came,” Ryan said. “Clear out and head back to your lines.”

“What about you?” Leto asked.

“We still got people here. We don’t leave without them. Anyway, we came to do a job. We got this far. I mean to do it.”

“Let’s go, Leto,” Raven said. “No point in throwing your life away. This was a crazy-stupe idea from the start.” She shot Ryan a death glare.

“No,” Jak said. “Not found.”

“Somebody set off the alarm,” Mildred stated.

“Nobody else has come close to us since the alarm start going,” Krysty added.

“Even if nobody knows exactly where we are,” Raven said, “the whole nuking building knows we’re here.”

They heard voices from outside their field of vision in the larger room. Making a snap decision, Ryan gestured the group into the room Mildred had so recently rendered vacant. He and Leto grabbed Donut’s ankles and dragged him in with them.

There wasn’t much they could do about the giant pool and smear of blood.

Mildred crouched and poked her head around the door, just enough to see out. A knot of men and women came dashing into the chamber from the right, some still hauling on black sec-man blouses.

Somebody else appeared in the mouth of the far corridor. Mildred reflexively started to shrink back, but he didn’t look her way.

“Attack, attack!” he yelled, waving a frantic hand. “Move it! Angels comin’ over the wire!”

He turned and raced off with the others right on his heels.

“We are, are we?” Raven said. She cocked an eyebrow at Leto.

“News to me,” the Angel boss said.

“Could they be victims of mistaken identity?” Doc asked.

“Mebbe,” Ryan said.

“They probably think Ricky and J.B. in the war wag are part of a general attack,” Krysty told them.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “Key is, they think their troubles are all on the outside. So let’s push on.”

“Weren’t we going to split up here?” Leto said.

“We were. Conditions have changed. We need to see what’s happening. We can always split later.”

Leto nodded briskly. “Ace.”

“What about disguises?” Bronk asked.

“Where we’re going right now,” Ryan said, “nobody’s going to see us.”

* * *

“
W
HAT IS THIS
PLACE
?” Raven asked, looking all around by the light of the lantern she held. It was one of the two they had scavenged from the office whose occupants Mildred had so efficiently disposed of.

The area was narrow but high ceilinged, with walls of stone that were cool to the touch. It twisted left and right suddenly and without explanation. Then again, the open corridors in this insane building tended to do that, too.

“What it looks like,” Ryan said. He was bringing up the rear again with the other torch. “Secret passage.”

Jak led the way because he knew it best.

Raven looked back, and for once he saw something other than anger—whether repressed or not—in her dark eyes. This time they seemed to hold a mixture of wonder and disgust.

Or maybe I’m letting my imagination run away with me again, he thought.

“Seriously?”

“Jak and Ricky found them during our downtime when we were bunking here,” Krysty said. “They’re veined all through the building—all fourteen floors of the tower. It’s quite clever, really.”

“So Michaud and Bone gave you the run of the place, huh?” Raven asked. She was back to her nasty, skeptical self. Ryan wondered if that was her natural state, or if they had made her that way.

“They went snooping around where they weren’t supposed to,” Mildred said. “They’re like that.”

She touched a wooden door as she passed. “The passages open into all kinds of rooms. Secret entrances.”

“Who’d build something like this?” Bronk asked.

“Masons,” Mildred said.

“Who’re they?” the powerfully built woman asked. “Some kind of gang?”

“More or less.”

“Don’t the mayor’s people know about these passages?” Leto asked.

“Bet Hizzoner does,” Ryan said. “And Bone. I suspect they keep the info to themselves and discourage their own people from prying into things. Jak and Ricky said most of the ones they found didn’t seem like they’d been used in years.”

“This one’s sure dusty,” Mildred said, stifling a cough.

Like a ghost materializing from the darkness, Jak appeared in the gleam of Raven’s lantern ahead of the party. He held up a thumb.

“Shut it, people,” Ryan said. “We’re there.”

He squeezed past the others to join Jak at the front of the line. His own lantern light quickly showed a doorway capping off the secret passage.

“Here,” he said, handing off the lantern to Leto. “Take this back a bit and dial both the lanterns down so we don’t get backlit.”

He caught another furious look from Raven, but Leto nodded. He tapped the woman on the arm, and they both moved back a few steps.

“Somebody’s still shooting out there,” Mildred said. “A lot.”

“Smell smoke,” Jak added.

“Let’s see what’s going on then.”

The secret doors were meant to be opened by feel. Ryan opened this one in the dark and cracked the door.

The light that instantly streamed in was yellow and too bright and flickered too much to only come from the lanterns that lit the great lobby twenty-four hours a day.

The little antechamber beyond had been stripped of most of its bizarre and gaudy decorations. What remained was age-cracked wooden wainscoting somebody had tried to oil and polish back into a semblance of respectability, walls painted what once had been white and a single heavy carven wood sofa with some lumpy modern-made pillows. Beyond, the lobby looked as if it gave entry not to a cathedral, but hell. The yellow glare danced like fire demons on the high walls and elaborately figured ceiling. A bareheaded SWAT officer ran by carrying a longblaster in one hand and hollering something over his shoulder. The blasterfire seemed to be coming mostly from the left.

The stink of burning alcohol and propellant was overpowering.

“I don’t like this, Ryan,” Krysty said.

“Me, neither.”

He moved cautiously forward. The others followed.