The rest of them all had their blasters at the ready, peering out through the dripping bushes at the last scenes of the bloody ritual.
“When you’re ready,” Ryan said, leveling his own blaster at the dangling head of the crucified man.
There was a blinding flash of chem lightning, like a purple spear, exploding against the top of one of the pines, less than a hundred yards away, igniting the tall tree as it seared its way to the ground. It was followed instantly by a massive rumble of deafening thunder.
The noise drowned out the thin crack of the ZKR 551, though Ryan sensed Mildred shooting and saw the effect of her single shot.
She fired again, at the young man who was concentrating on lighting the fire, bent forward. The .38 round took him through the back of the skull, a little to the left. The round tumbled as soon as it hit the bone, distorting, rolling and slicing through the soft tissues of the brain. It erupted through his open mouth in a welter of gray, pink and scarlet, and white shards of bone, smashing his teeth and shredding his chubby lips. His scream of shock and horror was choked off with a gush of blood and a grue of brain matter.
The rest of the naked coven stopped stock-still. To them it had to have appeared that their companion had been stricken down by a blast from heaven. Like Ryan, they couldn’t possibly have heard the sound of the shot above the crash of thunder. And there was the young man rolling on his back, fists clenched, flailing, feet scrabbling in the muddy earth, eyes wide open, the rain splashing on them. It looked as if some horrific accident had led to him vomiting out his own brains.
The tall leader started to turn toward the undergrowth, the only one of the group to begin to suspect that they were under attack.
Krysty shot him through the upper chest with her first shot, sending him staggering backward, tumbling over his own feet and landing on his back in the remnants of the big fire. He began to yell in a frantic, high-pitched voice.
Then the clearing became a maelstrom of death. It was a far, far worse massacre than that of the Mescalero Apaches—more helpless, defenseless dead.
Most of the dead fell to the chattering spray from the barrel of J.B.’s Uzi, a hail of leaden slaughter that sent them spinning and dancing in a ghastly parody of riotous pleasure. Blood fountained from sliced flesh, turning pink in the torrential downpour.
Because of the shortage of ammo for his Le Mat, Doc was the only one of the seven not to engage in the shooting party, instead watching the butchery, stone-faced.
By a freak of happenstance, one of the women escaped the killing ground. A bullet from Dean’s blaster had clipped her right shoulder, but she managed to stagger away, dodging and sliding in the mud, mouth gaping in a silent shriek of horror. Ryan tried a snap shot at her as she slithered on hands and knees behind a clump of aspens, but the bullet stripped off a length of bark and missed her by a good eighteen inches.
“Get her, Jak,” he snapped. “Don’t want word of this to get out.”
The teenager holstered his blaster and was off, a white-haired ghost, vanishing surefooted into the gloom like an avenging angel of savage death.
“J.B., drag that corpse out of the fire,” Ryan said, stepping cautiously from cover.
There was little movement in the clearing. One of the older men had been gut shot and was rolling from side to side, clutching the gaping wound in his scrawny belly. Threads of gray-yellow entrails seeped out into the dirt. Ryan holstered the blaster and drew the panga, stooping and cutting open the dying man’s jugular, giving him a swift and merciful passing that had been denied to the wretched figure that dangled upside down from the tree. Blood sprayed out, and Ryan stepped neatly to one side to avoid having it splatter over his pants and boots.
The Armorer dragged the tall, skinny corpse from the smoldering remnants of the fire, where it had already begun to blister and scorch, the hair sizzling and stinking in the cool dampness.