A shutter rattled on the top floor of the house, and Jim was relieved to hear the silk-ripping noise of Nanci’s Port Royale machine pistol.
The last of the unwounded men went spinning and dancing, the 9 mm bullets creating puffs of pale dust and clumps of blood wherever they hit.
There was only one of the quartet still on his feet, both hands clasped to the wound in his side that was leaking a steady trickle of blood, black in the moonlight.
“No, mister,” he pleaded. “I don’t know fucking nothing about all of this. Ally said the dummy was her kid and you stole him from her. I’ll move on. Don’t want any part of it. Truth, mister. Gimme a chance.”
There were voices from the house shouting to Jim Hilton. Most seemed to be telling him to kill the wounded man, but he ignored them all.
He listened to the shaky voice of Sly Romero, now on hands and knees. “He was one hit me.”
The fifth bullet from the Ruger hit the last survivor of the raid through the throat, blowing away most of the cervical vertebrae and almost severing the skull from the spine. The head flopped backward, the tongue protruding, becoming invisible in the gusher of arterial blood that pumped from the gaping wound in the neck.
“One still living,” called Nanci Simms. “On hands and knees there.”
Carrie Princip’s little .22 cracked three times, and the crouched figure in the yard rolled slowly over on his side and lay still, eyes white in the moonlight.
“Purse guns are still useful,” she called.
But Jim wasn’t listening. He had gone straight to Sly, holstering the warm revolver, and put his arms around the quivering boy.
“You did brilliantly, Sly,” he said, his own voice sounding cracked and harsh with the released tension. “Brilliant the way you warned us.”
Sly was crying, great gobbets of tears rolling down his plump cheeks. “Mom was always horrid to me, Jim. Slapped me and man hit me in belly and they said me was to get you to open the door. Me knew they want to hurt you with their guns.” He wiped his eyes and sniffed. “Me tricked them, yeah?”
“By God, but you sure did, son.”
“Steve be…?”
Jim hugged him tight, choking off the question. “You can bet your last dollar on it, Sly. Steve’s about the proudest man in the whole wide universe right now.”
To his surprise and passing embarrassment, Jim Hilton found that he was also crying.
Chapter Thirty
It was a little after five o’clock on the morning of December 26.
John Kennedy Zelig was awake in his narrow canvas bed, running through all the options in his mind. All the strands of future possibility. Where might James Hilton be now? Where might the dead Flagg’s whoremongering mistress be? What had happened to the Chinooks? The reports that they’d received from their informants had all indicated poor weather with ground-zero cloud cover. The longer that continued, the more chance Operation Tempest might have of success.
“The day after the day of Christmas,” he said to himself. “And that’s the day of the martyrdom of the first Christian martyr, the Blessed Stephen. Can’t be a coincidence, can it? But is it a good omen?”
The way society had crumbled after Earthblood spread its crimson tentacles across the plant life of the world had been so rapid that there had been no time to formulate plans. Operation Tempest had originally been a thick folder, bound in dark green morocco, collecting layers of dust on a back shelf in a deserted office. It had been drawn up in the 1980s, when the great ecological fear had been some sort of nuclear disaster, either accidental or military.
But times had moved on.
Zelig knew that if he’d been able to obtain more hardware, he could have gone openly against the Hunters of the Sun and wiped them off the face of the planet. On the other hand, if Flagg had been able to get his claws into a few missiles, the days for Aurora would have been numbered.
One of the M113s in Zelig’s column had their one and only usable missile, which he was holding in reserve against the threat of a helicopter attack.